05! CALIF* LIlRaHY, LOS 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 



THE 



HUMAN INTEREST 



A STUDY IN INCOMPATIBILITIES 



BY 



VIOLET HUNT 

AUTHOR Of 
"A HARD WOMAN," " UNKI8T UNKIND," " THE MAIDEN'S PROGRESS." 





HERBERT S. STONE AND COMPANY 
CHICAGO AND NEW YORK 

MDCCCXCIX 

\ fo ' 



COPYRIGHT 1899, BY 
HERBERT 8. STONE & CO 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 



CHAPTEE I 

One dull afternoon and it was in summer a 
London authoress of some repute, whose nom-de- 
gnerre was Egidia, was wandering along the pave- 
ment of a dull and imposing street in Newcastle. 
Day was beginning to decline, but the approach of 
evening was not alone responsible for the heartfelt 
ejaculation of the South-country woman, "Oh, this 
Northern gloom!" as she walked along under the 
smoky pall that, summer and winter, shrouds the city. 

She stood still presently, carefully scanning the 
solemn, stately houses with pillared porticos all of 
the self -same pattern, which run in an interminable 
row to a vanishing point seemingly far beyond con- 
jecture. 

"Each of the houses is exactly like the other," she 
murmured to herself. "In which, I wonder, does 
the Muse of Newcastle hold her court? Like most 
muses, she gave no number. I must judge by out- 

1 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 



sides. Oh, here we are; green Liberty curtains in 
the windows a more daring green on the door a 
knocker of mediaeval tendencies! I will try." 

She went up the steps of No. 59 Savile Street and 
rang the bell, and stood there pensive. 

"I promised to call on this woman, and I am doing 
it, but I shall be bored. She will talk of Ibsen, and 
Meredith, and tell me she had read Plato through 
before she was fifteen. She will take herself seri- 
ously, and me too, and inundate me with questions 
about the people in London. All these provincials 
do. Still, she pressed me so prettily to call that I 
could not say No. But I shall be bored! Is Mrs. 
Mortimer Elles at home?" she enquired of the hand- 
some, full-blown parlour maid who opened the door 
widely and invitingly. 

"Oh, yes, ma'am this is Mrs. Elles' day at home." 

"Much too familiar!" thought Egidia, as she fol- 
lowed the swing of the maid's cap streamers through 
portiered doorways and past Syrian shawl-draped 
cornices, and other pathetically futile attempts to 
conceal the impossible architecture of a commonplace 
house, built in a bad period, and decorated originally 
on the worst principles. 

"Muslin curtains are a mistake in an atmosphere 
like this of Newcastle!" she thought, "and a parlour- 
maid should not aim at looking like Madame Sans 
Gene." 

She was shown into a drawing-room, "stamped 
with the evidences of culture," as the interviewer 



THE HUMAN INTEKEST 



would say, and "redolent of a personality." Books 
were scattered about ; the piano stood open, with the 
latest "mood" of the latest fashionable composer 
lying on it; there were magazines, with paper-knives 
negligently bisecting their leaves. There were, on 
the walls, some grim old pictures family portraits, 
presumably of ill-tempered, high-stocked old gentle- 
men and prim, dignified ladies, but they were inter- 
spersed with sundry scratchy and erratic modern 
etchings and photogravures; there were great bowls 
of flowers whose apparent substance, the authoress 
could not help suspecting, was cleverly eked out with 
artificial imitations procurable at drapers' shops. 
The whole effect was rather pretty and French, and 
thoroughly out of keeping with the grim realities of 
Northern hardness and abnegation of art-feeling that 
reigned outside. 

A young woman, beautifully dressed, who was sit- 
ting over the fire, though it was not cold, rose eagerly 
to receive her distinguished guest, exclaiming, with 
the most flattering and heart-felt emphasis, 

"Oh, Miss Giles, how good of you to come! I was 
afraid you would have quite forgotten me and my day ! ' ' 

She was a slight woman, not tall, but slender 
enough to look so. Her eyes were very large and 
bright, her cheeks, flushed, perhaps with the fire. 
She made wrinkles when she laughed, but she did not 
look more than twenty-eight. A little powder, care- 
lessly and innocently cast there, showed on cheeks 
"hollowed a little mournfully," as the poet has it. 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 



Her hair was arranged in hundreds of little waves and 
curls, and her dress Egidia had been in the best 
houses in Newcastle, during the last few days, but 
had seen nothing to equal the style and taste of this 
little solicitor's wife. Thought and ingenuity had 
gone to the devising of that gown, but the wearer of 
it had forgotten to fasten the last two buttons of her 
sleeve. 

"The artistic sense strongly developed but very 
little power of co-ordination." So the authoress, 
taking all these points into consideration and exercis- 
ing her own professional faculty of classification, 
mentally assessed her hostess. 

"This is my day," Mrs. Elles was assuring her. 
"I partly hope people will come, and partly not. I 
would so much rather have you to myself but then, 
some of my friends were so anxious to meet you when 
I said I knew you so I had to give them a chance 
you don't mind being lionized a little, do you? We 
can't help it!" 

The "celebrity" had been a "celebrity" so long 
that she had left off objecting to the outward indica- 
tions of her supremacy. Though she was a lion, and 
gave lectures, she was modest and easily pacified. 
She was fascinated by something curiously plaintive 
and beguiling about her hostess's voice and manner ; 
a suggestion of childishness, of almost weakness as 
she thought, in its artificial cadences. For it was an 
affectation, Miss Giles, whose nom-de-guerre was 
Egidia, decided, though a pleasing one. 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 



"I wonder if she scolds her servants in that tone?" 
she thought, while submitting to the charm, and, 
lying easily back in her chair, listened to her hostess's 
ecstasies about her books and her lectures, her prettily 
expressed enviousness of the presumably happier con- 
ditions of her guest's life in London. 

4 'Oh, what it must be to be in the midst of life, 
really in it of it part of it! Here one sits, and 
yearns, and only catches the far-away echoes, the 
reverberations of the delightful things that are hap- 
pening, away down there, where you are in the very, 
very heart of it all!" 

The peri left out of Paradise clasped her pretty, 
soft, pliant hands, and the novelist asked her, willing 
to be instructed, 

"Is Newcastle, then, worse than other provincial 
towns?" 

"I only know Newcastle, but I am sure it's worse. 
There are a few nice advanced people, but they go 
away all the time, or if they bring nice people down 
from London, they keep them to themselves. I never 
see any one worth talking to. Oh, it is hopeless 
hopeless!" She shrugged her shoiilders. "It is 
simply a form of Hades, this life for me, for I have 
'glimpses of what might make me less forlorn,' of a 
life to live, a world to move in. I feel I was not 
meant to merely stagnate to vegetate to wither 
gradually away, consumed by my own wasted energies. 
You laugh! coming straight, as you do, from that 
paradise of life and movement, that I am sure London 



6 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

i 

is, you can have no idea of what Newcastle and my 
life is! Inertia kills people like me, one's soul is 
starved, don't you know? one's mental life has noth- 
ing to feed on, no pabulum, except books and they 
are not easy to get new books. I am the trial and 
pest of the libraries here!" 

"You read a great deal?" 

"Oh, yes. I live on books. They are the greatest 
possible comfort to me. They are literally my sav- 
iours. I quite sympathize with the heroine of a novel 
I read lately, who was kept from suicide by the sight 
of her favourite poets on her book -shelf! I make 
myself up a dream-life, don't you know the life I 
should like to live if I could choose. One dream- 
life, do I say?" Her eyes lightened and brightened: 
she was extraordinarily alert and vivid. "Two or 
three a perfect orgy of dream-lives! They cost 
nothing. But I have always read a great deal. The 
classics I don't neglect. I read Plato before I was 
fifteen in Jowett's translation, of course." 

Egidia smiled. 

"And your books?" 

"Don't ! don't !" Egidia held up her hands. 

"But I love them I go to them for comfort and 
help. I have them all on a shelf near my bed a 
whole row of my favourites Browning, and Meredith 
and Ibsen. I am a great Ibsenite are not you?" 

"It is very fashionable!" 

"Oh! but really, don't you think?" She was 
becoming quite incoherent in her excitement. "Now, 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 



Nora in the 'Doll's House'? It is the story of so 
many of us. Only it is a mistake of Ibsen to make 
the husband a cheat that seems to put him too much 
in the wrong, he is wrong enough, without that. 
Oh, Nora was so right to leave him, I think. So 
strong ! Do you know the sound of the house door 
banging in that play stirs me like the sound of a 
trumpet?" 

"You should write a book yourself!" suggested 
Egidia, indulgently, knowing well the answer she 
would receive. 

"Ah! I haven't time. But if I did, I could put in 
things things that have happened to me experience 
more of feeling than of incident, perhaps. I was 
an only daughter; my father was in the army; I 
travelled a good deal ; but I have not had a life of 
adventure; I married when I was seventeen. My 
husband was a widower then, and his son, Charles, 
lives with us and his aunt, Mrs. Poynder." She 
had an involuntary little shudder. "He is a solici- 
tor; you know that. And he has a huge practice. 
He is very much occupied, and takes no interest in 
the things you and I care about. Of course, he 
laughs at me for my enthusiasms but I should die 
if I didn't." 

There were tears in her eyes. 

"Some day, if you will, you must come and stop 
with me in town," said Egidia, in an access of 
womanly compassion for this somewhat ungrammat- 
ical but sincere tale of misfortune. 



8 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

"Shall I? Shall I? Oh, how lovely that would 
be!" Her brilliant smile came out again. "To see 
to have a glimpse of all those wonderful literary 
people in whose company your life is spent." 

"Well, I happen to know more of artists than I do 
of literary people," said Egidia. "You see, my own 
'shop' bores me. Do you collect I am sure you do?" 
She had seen the unmistakable flame of the auto- 
graph-fever leap into Mrs. Elles' eyes. "I can send 
you some, if you like. I have one in my pocket now 
that I can give you, from Edmund Rivers, the land- 
scape painter. " 

"The R. A.?" Mrs. Elles, who always took care to 
have a Royal Academy Catalogue sent up to her 
every year, and learnt it by heart, enquired eagerly. 

"Yes, the R. A. and my second cousin!" Egidia 
answered, carelessly pulling a crumpled note out 
of her pocket and handing it to Mrs. Elles. "Read 
it!" 

"Dear Alice," (read Mrs. Elles), "I am so sorry 
that I cannot have the pleasure of dining with you 
on the 31st, but I hope to be in the North on the 
26th, at latest, to begin my summer campaign. I see 
the spring buds in the parks, and the Inspector of 
Nuisances has invited me to clip my sprouting lilac 
bushes, and it all reminds me too painfully of the 
paradise of greenness that is growing up in the 
country, and calling me. I shall soon be 'a green 
thought in a green shade' as Marvel says, and very 
much in my element. Yours ever, Edmund Rivers." 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 9 

"The twenty-sixth," said Mrs. Elles, meditating. 
"This is the thirtieth. Then he is gone." 

"Oh, yes, no one will set eyes on him again till 
November, when he comes back from what he calls 
his summer campaign. He takes good care that none 
of us shall even know where his happy hunting 
ground is somewhere in Yorkshire, I believe ! Oh, 
yes, you may keep the letter." 

Mrs. Elles took the letter with her pretty, be-ringed 
fingers, and scanned it again with the air of a con- 
noisseur. 

"Do you know," she said, "I take a double inter- 
est in these things ; first of all, because they are auto- 
graphs of distinguished people, but, in the second 
place, because I can read their characters so well 
from their handwritings." 

"I wonder if you can tell me anything of this 
man's character, then?" said the novelist, with a look 
in her eyes which set Mrs. Elles thinking. Miss 
Giles, in her way, was attractive. It was not Mrs. 
Elles' way, but Mrs. Elles had sufficient discernment 
to see merit in a style that was not her style at all. 
Miss Giles had no pose, unless it was that of bon- 
homie. The charm of her face lay in its nobility, 
touched with shrewdness ; a certain modest mannish- 
ness as of a woman who had to look after herself, and 
who had cut out a way for herself, marked her appear- 
ance. Her dress was not in any way unfeminine, but 
Mrs. Elles decided that she would have looked well, 
dressed as a boy. She had beautiful eyes, and dark 



10 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

hair that curled. She must always have looked 
thirty-six, and would probably never look any older 
than she looked now. 

"It is a very odd, characteristic handwriting 
indeed," she began gravely, "he is complicated, tre- 
mendously complicated, I should say." 

"He is an artist, a genius indeed, in my opinion," 
said the novelist, soberly. 

"Ah! then, of course, he has a right to be eccen- 
tric. They all are, aren't they? Well, isn't he a little 
how shall I say it? fanciful, faddish, difficult to 
got on with?" 

"You have, in the words of the song, 'got to know 
him first,' " quoted Egidia, laughing. 

"And you do know him, well, of course! But still, 
I should say he is what is called a misogynist." 

She was watching the effect of her words on the 
other. Even the strong-minded authoress of novels 
with a purpose has her weak spot, she was glad to see. 

"Hating women! Well, I can't say he pays them 
much attention. I don't suppose he ever looked at 
a woman in his life!" There was certainly a touch of 
bitterness in this speech, and Mrs. Elles was delighted. 

"Not married then!" she exclaimed. "And yet, I 
should say that he is not obtuse to the charm of 
material things that he is even a great lover of 
beauty in the abstract, then, I suppose. Nature 
you said he was a landscape painter, didn't you? 
Does he never put people into his pictures never put 
you, for instance?" 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 11 

Egidia laughed. 

"No? Well, I must say I don't care for pictures 
without any human interest at all." 

"Then you wouldn't care for Edmund Rivers' work, 
unless you could get your romance out of the scarred, 
weather-beaten face of an old windmill or a ruined 
castle ! He leaves the human interest entirely out of 
his pictures." 

"And out of his life, too, it seems," said the other, 
"and both suffer in consequence. Don't tell me; 
there is something wrong about a man who doesn't 
care for women ! Some day one will awaken him. 
But meantime I see a certain want of sympathy in the 
determined uprightness of these capital N's that 
refuse to merge properly into the letters that come 
after, and obstinacy in the blunt endings of those g's. 
And yet he must have great delicacy of touch he 
seems to feel certain words as he writes them. Isn't 
his painting very refined and delicate?" 

"It is all sorts, strong and delicate at once," Egidia 
asseverated with enthusiasm. 

"And he is a great friend of yours!" Mrs. Elles 
remarked conclusively, folding up the letter and put- 
ting it in her pocket. She was now quite confirmed 
in her theory that the authoress had a secret passion 
for the painter. "Is he young?" 

"Fifty!" said Egidia, bluntly; she was beginning 
to guess the drift of her companion's thoughts, and, 
though secretly amused at them, was minded to put 
her off a little, "and his hair is turning grey. " 



12 



"But I adore grey hair," Mrs. Elles exclaimed 
hastily and enthusiastically, as the door opened and 
a Miss Drummond was announced. 

"Oh dear!" ejaculated the hostess, almost in the 
new arrival's hearing, but made amends for her dis- 
courtesy by a very effusive greeting. She introduced 
"Miss Giles Egidia, you know;" with a flourish as 
one" with whom she was on deeply intimate terms, 
casting at the same time a pathetic, imploring look in 
the latter's direction, as much as to ask her not to 
discount her statement. Then more people came in. 
The room was filling. 

"Don't go," she whispered to Egidia, more as an 
appeal than a civility, and the good-natured authoress 
stayed and watched her, and studied her. 

She saw that dim notions of Madame Recamier to 
be emulated and a salon to be held prevailed in the 
mind of the lady whom she had dubbed the Muse of 
Newcastle. Such culture, such an atmosphere of 
literary gossip as is current in many a second-class 
literary centre in London, flourished here, and Mrs. 
Elles led the inferior revels with aplomb and discrimi- 
nation. She manoeuvred her guests very cleverly, on 
the whole, and talked much and well with the slight 
tendency to exaggerate which Egidia had already 
noticed in her. Like many restless, excitable people, 
she did not seem able to both talk and look at a per- 
son at the same time, and her restless eyes were con- 
tinually directed towards the door, as if expecting 
and dreading a fresh arrival. 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 13 

About half -past five the mystery was solved; a tall, 
well set-up woman of fifty walked in, bonnetless, who 
seemed to know nearly everybody and shook hands 
with all the painful effect of a bone-crushing machine, 
as Egidia experienced when "my aunt, Mrs. Poyn- 
der," was introduced to her. The stout lady then 
took a tiny seat near Miss Drummond, and Egidia 
was much diverted by her loudly -spoken comments on 
her niece's guests. She was a woman to whom a 
whisper was obviously an impossible operation. 

"And which is Fibby's grand London authoress 
she's so set up with?" she was heard to ask. "Fibby 
mumbles names so that I haven't a notion which it 
is! Oh, deary me, here's the Newcastle poet. I'm 
sure he has no call to stoop as he comes in; he 
needn't think he's tall enough to graze the lintel. 
. . . But I would dearly like to cut his hair for him. 
. . . Po-uttry! No! po-uttry I can't stand . . . 
why, if a man's got anything to say, can't he say it 
straight without so much ado?" The Newcastle poet, 
who wore his hair nearly as long as poets do in Lon- 
don, shook hands and presented a slim, green volume 
to Mrs. Elles. 

"You must write 'Phoebe Elles' in it!" his hostess 
said, imperiously, and led him to a side table, where, 
with many a dedicatory flourish, he did as she required. 
Then she introduced him to Egidia, with the air of 
one introducing Theocritus and Sappho. 

"And do you kill the lovers?" she asked, alluding, 
presumably, to characters in the volume she held. 



14 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

"How relentless of you!" She added to her guests, 
"I had the privilege of reading it in the proof, you 
know." 

"Ah! I had to kill them," he murmured, plaint- 
ively, "sooner than let them know the sad satiety of 
love." 

"My goodness!" Mrs. Poynder muttered. 

The conversation, appallingly immoral as it was, yet 
seemed to interest the good lady, for she drew nearer 
and formed a chorus to the very modern discussion 
that ensued between the poet and Egidia and her 
niece, of which London and London literary society 
was the theme. The epigrams that were flying about 
she visibly and audibly pooh-poohed. "Give me 
Newcastle!" she murmured at intervals, and "You, 
a mere lad, too!" was elicited from her by any 
world-weary extravagance of the poet's. He was in 
self-defence ; driven to incidentally mention his age 
quite a respectable age, as it appeared. Mrs. Elles 
was not to be outdone 

"I am twenty -six," he remarked, with an air of 
reluctant candour. 

"And a very good age to stop at!" observed her 
aunt, with intention. 

The novelist looked with compassion on this poor 
woman who, like Widrington, fought the battle of 
pose and society, at such frightful odds. The poet 
presently drifted in her direction and they held a 
short but epoch-making as regarded Mrs. Elles 
conversation. 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 15 

"Mrs. Poynder is to me just like an upas-tree," he 
confided to Egidia, wringing his hands together. 
"In her shadow, any poetical idea would wither and 
die!" 

"There is, indeed, a good deal of shadow!" 
remarked Egidia, alluding to Mrs. Poynder 's truly 
majestic proportions. "She is a handsome woman in 
her way!" 

"l^es," he replied wearily, "plenty of presence, 
and all of it bad, as they said of George III. But 
seriously, you know, she leads our dear friend a sad 
life. She contradicts her in everything, and thwarts 
every instinct of culture. If Mrs. Elles had not 
plenty of pluck, she would have given in long ago. 
And her husband!" he held up his hands. 

The poet's indiscretions bore fruit in a hearty invi- 
tation from Egidia to Mrs. Elles, to visit her often at 
the house where she was staying in Newcastle. 

"Brave little woman! I will try and cheer her up 
a bit!" she thought, as she left the house. 

The little party broke up soon after, and Mrs. Elles 
was left alone with her aunt, who, as the door closed 
on the last guest, opened her lips and gave, uncalled 
for, her opinions of the guest. 

"That's a real nice woman!" she said, "that littry 
friend of yours; I approve of her. It's a good thing 
I didn't take your advice, Fibby, and go trapesing up 
to Jesmond, this afternoon, to call on Miss Drum- 
mond. Why, the girl was here. And such a crowd, too. 
You said there wouldn't be anybody here to-day!" 



16 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

"Did I? One never knows," replied her niece 
negligently, sauntering up to the piano, and opening 
it. 

"I'll be bound you knew well enough, Fibby. 
Wanted to be rid of the old woman, eh? Well, I'm 
glad I defeated your little plans, and saw your friend, 
who seemed a sensible sort of woman, not the flyabas- 
tic sort you generally get here. Pity but she'd seen 
Mortimer!" 

"Do you think Mortimer would have impressed 
her?" asked his wife, bitterly. 

"And why not? Are you ashamed of your hus- 
band, Fibby? It's my belief that you are ashamed of 
us all, and hankering after those London people and 
the ramshackle life they seem to lead. Gallant times 
they have, to be sure! Thinking only of themselves 
and their pleasures and making love to each other's 
wives ! And you are just savage because you aren't 
there, too! Oh! I know you!" 

Mrs. Elles had broken out into a stormy mazurka 
that nearly drowned Mrs. Poynder's words, as possibly 
she intended it to do. "Ay! ay!" the latter 
remarked, "work it off that way I advise you!" 

"Don't insult me, aunt!" 

Mrs. Poynder laughed in her own harsh fashion, 
and, looking towards the door whose handles just 
then turned, called out, "Come in, Mortimer! Come 
and speak to this wife of yours!" 

The clumsy, thick-necked man who entered stopped 
short and looked round stupidly ; his wife sat with her 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 17 

back turned, playing; his aunt stood there, smiling 
her cruel, blighting smile, that showed a set of the 
most perfectly formed teeth that money could buy. 
He took his cue from her, and going across the room, 
laid a heavy hand on his wife's shoulder, saying 
kindly, 

"What's the matter, old lady?" 

"Oh, Mortimer, please don't call me that. I can't 
bear it!" 

She hid her face in the keyboard and sobbed vio- 
lently. 

"Well, really! "said he. 

"Hysterical!" said the aunt, still smiling. "I 
don't wonder, after the conversation we have been 
having, and the things we have been hearing! 
Fibby's had grand new London friends here to put 
her out of love with us all. We're all too plain and 
common for Fibby now!" 

Still smiling was a smile ever so denuded of grace 
and benevolence? she gathered up her crochet and 
left the room. Mrs. Elles then rose from the piano, 
and, dabbing her handkerchief to her eyes, made a 
step in the direction of the door. But she changed 
her mind and stood still by the mantelpiece with the 
figure half averted. 

"I'm sure I beg all your pardons," she murmured, 
almost inaudibly. "Oh, damn! where 's the paper?" 
said Mortimer Elles. Securing it, and sinking into 
an arm-chair with a great, puffing breath, he hid his 
face behind the broad white sheet. His coat tails 



18 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

caught the Oriental cloth on a small table near him 
and dragged it nearly off. Mrs. Elles rushed forward 
and saved one of the many pieces of china that rested 
on it from destruction. 

"Throw the beastly thing on the fire!" he growled 
out, without looking up. "This house is far too full." 
A gong sounded. 

"I am going up to dress for dinner," she said, 
aggressively, standing in front of him. "Shan't you, 
Mortimer?" 

"There's nobody coming, is there?" 
"No unfortunately but I like to dress." 
"Dress if you like, but don't bother me!" 
"Oh, I do wonder what you married me for, Morti- 
mer?" she complained with plaintive savageness. 

"I do wish you wouldn't talk nonsense!" he an- 
swered. "What has marriage to do with dressing for 
dinner?" 

"Perhaps more than you think," she murmured 
still in a low key, as she walked past him and opened 
the door. She crossed the hall slowly, like a somnam- 
bulist. It was true the conversation of Egidia and of 
the poet, who was no fool, and who had been brought 
out by the tact of the London woman, had set her 
thinking, and her mind travelling in a new direction. 
She trod on her gown going upstairs, and picked it up. 
with the tragically careless gesture of a Joan of Arc 
going to the stake. She made herself the effect of a 
prisoner in a strange land an alien princess in the 
hands of the Saracens the Lady of "Comus" among 



THE HUMAN INTEKEST 19 

the rabble rout. She was a delicate piece of porce- 
lain among rough earthenware pots a harp played 
upon by unknowing boors. She muttered to herself 
phrases of philosophy and resignation that she did not 
feel her whole soul was in revolt against the condi- 
tions of her life. 

"Oh, it is all so ugly!" she murmured. 

She paused on the landing and looked down. 
Charles, her step-son, had just come in and hung up 
his hat and clattered down every other hat in the hall. 

"Hallo, Mater!" he shouted up, "don't commit 
suicide over the banisters and make a mess ! Hurry 
up and get ready for dinner!" 

'I am glad I did not have a child," she said to 
herself. "He might have been half like that!" 

She dressed for dinner, in a very handsome, vapor- 
ous tea-gown, drank a little sal-volatile, read a couple 
of verses of Omar Khayam, and sailed into the dining- 
room, determined to be resigned, pathetic and amiable. 
Her husband's untidy, baggy shooting jacket, and 
Charles's abominable "blazer," gave her the usual 
jar, while Mrs. Poynder's cheap white lace tippet 
with pink ribbons was only another item in the gen- 
eral tale of the inappropriateness and disgust. She 
pouted, and dropped gracefully into her accustomed 
seat, looking like a piece of thistledown suddenly 
lighted on the dull leather-covered mahogany chair. 

The mild, provincial dinner proceeded. "What's 
this?" asked Mortimer, when a dish came round to 
him. "Put it on the table, can't you?" 



20 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

"Chicken croquettes. I like things handed!" she 
pleaded. 

"Do you? I don't. I like to have what I am eat- 
ing in front of me. You won't take any, Phoebe? 
Oh, very well. You want to get scraggier than you 
are. A lean wife is a standing reproach to a fellow." 

"Fibby is afraid of spoiling her fashionable figure!" 
observed Mrs. Poynder, drawing herself up, to show 
her own to the best advantage. It was of a certain 
solid merit, not to be gainsaid. 

"With these, and other family amenities, was the 
time of dining enlivened. Mrs. Elles' attitude was 
one of faintly raised eyebrows, but she did not allow 
herself to say anything to-day, that a heroine might 
regret. She was not generally so circumspect. As 
soon as dinner was over, she rose and followed Mrs. 
Poynder out of the room. Mrs. Poynder liked to go 
first, and she was allowed to do so when no one was 
there. Mortimer Elles, who was by no means in a 
bad humour, moved his chair a little to make way for 
his wife. 

"Do you call that a gown?" he said, fingering a 
fold of the shining satin. "And pray, what may 
that have cost me?" 

"Don't!" she said, drawing it away. 

"Surely I may touch it if I am to have the privi- 
lege of paying for it?" 

"It is not very nice of you, Mortimer, to remind 
me that I haven't a penny of my own, and must 
depend on your bounty!" 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 21 

"And a good job, too!" he said, laughing; he was 
certainly in a very good humour. "It's the only 
hold I've got on you the only way I have of keep- 
ing you in order." 

"Mortimer I am not a child!" 

"No, by Jove, not quite! Let me see, yon were 
nineteen when I married you we have been married 
ten years that makes you out ?" 

"You needn't trouble to go on," she replied 
haughtily, "I can't say that the subject interests me 
one only counts birthdays when one is happy." 

She escaped to her room, tore off the gauzy tea gown, 
and put on a black one which she reserved for occa- 
sions like this, when the mood of gloom preponder- 
ated. It was a little affectation of hers to dress as far 
as possible in character with her mood of the moment. 

Yes, she was very wretched had been for the 
last ten years. She wondered how she had borne it so 
long, and if she could go on bearing it. The time 
had surely come for her to do something what? 
She would go, to-morrow, and call on Egidia in the 
big house where she was staying at Jesmond Dene, 
and talk it all over with her. Egidia, being a pro- 
fessed searcher into the secrets of the heart, would be 
able to understand, and perhaps offer some solution 
of her dreadful predicament. She might even take a 
professional interest in it. "She can put me in a 
novel if she likes," Phoebe Elles said to herself, 
wearily, "but I must speak or I shall die!" 

Die of dullness, die of disappointment, die of inani- 



22 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

tion, or, what was worse, lose her looks. "They are 
the silent griefs that cut the heart-strings," she 
quoted, from Heaven knows what recondite Eliza- 
bethan play, "and dull the complexion," she added 
on her responsibility. She always read everything 
more or less with reference to herself, and twisted the 
most impassioned utterances of poetry and the drama 
into apt coincidence with her own affairs. 

Up till now, she had sedulously preserved the one 
virtue of neglected wives she had never "peached." 
She had scrupulously disdained the common vulgarity 
of confidences, the petty relief of expansion, and no 
one had ever heard her abuse her husband. She had 
learned to speak of him with an amused tolerance, 
whose undercurrent of contempt was not necessarily 
apparent to the merely superficial observer. It was a 
point of honour with her ; but deep below her grace- 
ful reticence lay the point of vanity she wanted 
people to think, if possible, that Mortimer, whom she 
had ceased to care for, was still desperately in love 
with her. 

She had read many French novels, and she knew 
that, socially speaking, there was one modus vivendi 
to be adopted by a woman in her position. She 
might create for herself some outside interest she 
might get up the harmless, necessary flirtation, by 
which women, circumstanced as she was, are apt to 
console themselves. 

Without the remotest intention of actually pursuing 
it, she began to cast about in her mind for a possible 



THE HUMAN INTEKEST 23 

coadjutor in such a course of action. She began to 
count heads, to consider all the eligible flirtations- 
that Newcastle afforded, with a drear little smile at 
the paucity of attractions, at the inferiority of the 
subject material which presented itself to her mind. 

The poet! He was handsome, clever, romantic; 
he admired her much, but only on condition that she 
returned his compliment and admired him more! 
That would not do. Besides, her present pose to him 
was that of a mother a very young mother of course 
and promoter of his incipient predilection for the 
handsome and "horsey" Miss Drummond, Atalanta- 
Diana as he was pleased to call her ; the girl of strong 
physique and mannish tastes, who was the comple- 
ment of his own nature. Then there was Dr. Moor- 
som, who lived next door "The man whose business 
it would be to doctor me if I fell ill!" she sneered to 
herself. Everyone was supremely uninteresting as 
uninteresting as Mortimer. That was the worst of it 
Mortimer was odious, but then, so was everybody 
else. 

No, better be "straight" and a martyr, than set 
herself, at the cost of her reputation, perhaps, to 
wrest from society a merely nominal happiness, and 
court a catastrophe that would have none of the ele- 
ments of grandeur or romance about it. She would 
go back to her "dream-lives" to the literary simu- 
lacra of existence which, till the epoch-making 
advent of the South-country novelist, had sufficed 
her, and had been as the mirror Perseus held up 



24 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

before Andromeda, affording her the harmless vision 
of the Gorgon's head with the snaky horror of its 
locks that may stand for life and the hideous compli- 
cations thereof. 



CHAPTER II 

"But then, you know, I have never seen your hus- 
band," Egidia was saying to the pretty little woman 
who, sunk deep in the billowy mound of a very 
easy chair, her feet upheld to the glow of a North- 
country fire blazing away in the very height of summer, 
as usual, was expatiating in the sweetest of voices 
on her matrimonial unhappiness. She was telling 
Egidia all the truth, or thought she was, and the 
novelist, in her double capacity of friend and gatherer 
of welcome "copy," was listening sympathetically 
from her sofa. 

It was a charming house in the suburbs of New- 
castle, the abode of charming people, where Egidia 
was staying, and Mrs. Elles deeply appreciated the 
friendship with the fashionable lecturer, which had 
gained her the entry into this home of modernity and 
culture. 

"Yes, if yon once saw Mortimer," Mrs. Elles went 
on, "you would understand all!" 

The way she uttered the last word would not have 
disgraced a tragic actress. 

"I want you to come and dine will you? "What 
day shall it be? Tell me, and I'll fix it. Then you 
will see him, and judge for yourself." 

25 



26 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

"My dear," said the novelist, slowly, "I will come 
to your dinner with pleasure, but I shall not know 
any more than you have told me." 

"Yes; I have been very, very frank," said Mrs. 
Elles. "And there is another thing" she sighed 
vaguely. She was aluding to her husband's habit of 
tippling, to which as a loyal wife she forbore from a 
more direct allusion. 

"As a general rule," Egidia went on, a little 
didactically, in her capacity of mentor, "no husband 
understands any wife. If he did, he wouldn't have 
cared to marry her. It is the mutual antagonism 
between the sexes which makes them interesting to 
each other in the beginning. But, afterwards if 
they are unable to play the game exciting enough, I 
should think of observing, of adjusting, of utilizing 
their mutual divergences of character and getting 
amusement out of them if she finds no pleasure in 
the exercise of tact, if he none in the further analysis 
of the feminine vagaries that he began by finding so 
charming then, they begin to jar mutually on each 
other, and turn that into tragedy which should be 
the comedy of life for both of them." 

"I understand, "said Mrs. Elles, humbly; "butthen 
there is not, and could not be, any comedy of life 
with Mortimer, or tragedy either! There never was. 
I don't seem to care to appreciate his character, I 
know it it is quite simple I see it all spread out 
before me like a map of a country I don't care to 
travel over." 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 27 

"But perhaps he can say the same of you," haz- 
arded Egidia. 

"No, Mortimer has never understood me, never! 
I am a sealed book to him," said the wife, airily, 
although Miss Giles' suggestion had indeed given her 
a little shock. 

"Don't flatter yourself, my dear, that you are a 
sealed book to anyone. It is the common delusion." 
(Another shock to Mrs. Elles!) "One is always so 
much less interesting, so much less complicated, so 
much less of a sphinx than one thinks." 

"But I have always thought of mine as a very com- 
plicated nature," Mrs. Elles rejoined, pouting; "I 
am sure I can't tell you how many thoughts pass 
through my mind in a day, and I seem to have a 
perfectly new mood every minute." 

"So we all have, but we don't take cognizance of 
them or act on them all. I should say that you are 
one of those people who begin with a radical mistake 
that of expecting too much of life. You think you 
have a right to be happy. Good Heavens ! You seek 
for midi a quatorze heures, you love change for its 
own sake; you positively enjoy hot water. You 
would rather have a painful emotion than none at all, 
you would like to cry, with Sophie Arnould, 'Oh, le 
bon temps, j'etais si malheureuse!' You have not 
mastered the great fact, that emotions are not to the 
emotional; to them is generally awarded the dreary 
crux of the commonplace, and that I think is hardest 
to bear of all, that one's cross should come in the way 



28 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

of material comfort and spiritual uneventfulness, and 
when it comes to the point, instead of action to be 
taken there is only temper to be kept!" 

"I always scorn to nag," said Mrs. Elles, "it seems 
so ungraceful." 

"I am sure, my dear, that whatever you may feel, 
you always manage to look decorative !" said the other, 
smiling. "Still, you expect too much and give too 
little to be what I call easy to live with!" 

"That is what I say," cried Mrs. Elles, trium- 
phantly. "I call that being complicated." 

"Do you?" said the authoress, drily. "I should be 
tempted to call it want of social tact an almost cul- 
pable ignorance of the science of give and take, 
a you must really forgive me for my brutal frank- 
ness" she broke off suddenly and laughed con- 
fusedly "but, you know, you asked me to speak 
freely." 

"I love it," declared Phoebe Elles, adjusting a 
cushion behind her head. "I think I like to talk 
about myself, even if it is disagreeable," she added, 
with unusual frankness. 

Egidia smiled irresistibly. It was impossible for 
her to help liking this unconscious egotist, who con- 
fessed to her failings with such a grace, and took 
plain speaking with such aplomb. 

"I think, " she said, trying to give aless serious turn 
to the conversation, "what you really wanted, in 
marriage, was a man who would have dominated you 
have beaten you, perhaps." 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 29 

"Yes, I do really believe I should," said Mrs. 
Elles; "that is, if I loved him desperately at the time 
and he loved me desperately afterwards ! But," she 
went on, seriously, "you have given me your views on 
marriage, and my marriage in particular, but, now 
you know all my life, what do you advise me to do?" 

"Do? Do nothing! What can you do? What 
can any woman do?" asked Egidia, raising her well- 
marked eyebrows, and with an air of dismissing an 
impracticable subject. 

Then, seeing the unmistakable look of disappoint- 
ment in the eyes of her feminine Telemachus, she 
added kindly, "Ah, you see, when we outsiders come 
to the domain of practical politics, we are mere 
theorists all at sea, and just as helpless and resource- 
less as any of you slaves of the ring can possibly be. 
I should advise you to make the best of it, and pray 
that you may never meet anybody you like better 
than the man you have got!" 

Mrs. Elles rose to go, it was late. She had had a 
good time. She had enjoyed the personal discussion, 
but there was a wilful twist about her mouth, as of 
one which had swallowed much advice, but had 
swallowed it the wrong way. 

"After this, I must not ask you to come and stop 
with me in London, I am afraid," added Egidia. 

"Oh, please do, and I will promise to wear blinkers. " 

"Blue spectacles would be nearer the mark!" said 
the novelist. "Do that, and I will engage to intro- 
duce you to Edmund Rivers with impunity." 



30 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

"Well, but you said just now he was incapable of 
falling in love with any woman." 

"Yes, but I never implied that women found it 
impossible to fall in love with him!" answered Egidia, 
quite gravely. "He is handsome and indifferent, 
and I know of no combination more dangerous to the 
peace of our sex!" 

Mrs. Elles' little dinner was arranged; the invita- 
tions, written on beautiful rough note paper with an 
artistic ragged edge, sent out. Mrs. Elles had con- 
scientiously consulted her husband's list of engage- 
ments and saw that he was free, and put down a large 
cross for the eleventh. Mortimer would see that he 
was engaged, and would, as usual, be too lazy or care- 
less to enquire further. On the evening in question, 
he would necessarily see "what was up," and would 
grumblingly admit that he was "let in for one of 
Phoebe's confounded dinners" instead of a happy 
gathering at the Continental Club with the "fellows. " 

His wife would, of course, have got on far better 
without him, as far as the success of her party was 
concerned, only society so far considers the husband, 
even if his social capacities are nil, as a necessary 
adjunct to the dinner table. He has not yet gone 
out with the epergne, and therefore must be toler- 
ated. But with regard to Mrs. Poynder and Charles, 
the mistress of the house had put her foot down. 
She was famous for her little dinners, the entrain of 
which the presence of her husband did not seem, so 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 31 

far, to have materially diminished. But that of the 
other two would have been fatally destructive of 
charm. The pair had been induced to see the matter 
in somewhat of the same light four members of a 
family were a little overwhelming and the question 
of economy had weight with Mrs. Poynder. Aunt 
and nephew were in the habit of considerately inviting 
themselves out to high tea at the house of a relation 
of Mortimer's in Newcastle on these occasions. 
Mrs. Poynder, indeed, owned to a want of sympathy 
with the "people Fibby contrived to get together," and 
she was not informed that Miss Giles, for whom she 
had developed an unaccountable fancy, was to be of 
the party. 

"My old woman of the sea," so Mrs. Elles some- 
times spoke of her to her intimates, in whose eyes the 
ways and speeches of the terrible old lady amply justi- 
fied the want of reticence implied in her niece's indis- 
creet sobriquet. Why must she form part of the 
Elles household? Everybody wondered, but Mrs. 
Elles knew. 

For on this point the husband was immutable. He 
saw plainly that on Mrs. Poynder did his manly 
bourgeois comfort depend. His wife only attended 
to the show side of housekeeping ; she saw that there 
was always plenty of flowers in the drawing-room, 
winter and summer but Mrs. Poynder attended to 
his shirts and their proper complement of buttons. 
Mrs. Elles ordered dinner, but Mrs. Poynder kept 
the books and interviewed the tradesmen. His wife 



32 THE HUMAN INTEKEST 

paid the smart calls, but Mrs. Poyndcr looked up his 
dull and important relations, and, in her rough 
undiplomatic way, advanced his affairs. She exer- 
cised a certain modest supervision over the whisky 
bottle, and without saying much, curbed Mortimer's 
drunken tendencies a good deal. 

Mrs. Elles herself was vaguely cognizant of the 
advantages of this system, and realized that Mrs. 
Poynder's presence in the menage gave her leisure 
to attend to the cultivation of the graces of her own 
mind and person, and exonerated her from the thank- 
less task of confronting Mortimer on the tedious mat- 
ters of servants, wages, and housekeeping and partial 
abstention. 

"Aunt Poynder goes down into the arena for 
me, and fights with wild beasts in the kitchen," the 
ungrateful young woman used to say. "She likes it, 
I verily believe. But some of their roughness rubs 
off on her," she would add, and nobody would gainsay 
her. Mrs. Poynder was the professed Disagreeable 
Woman of Newcastle, and people were apt to fly up 
side alleys and into shops when they saw her come 
sailing majestically down Granger Street. 

"Oh, Mortimer, why did you go and have such 
awful relations?" Mrs. Elles exclaimed casually to 
her husband, one afternoon, when she came back 
from a visit to Egidia at Jesmond. She was impelled 
to say it. Mrs. Poynder's coarseness and Charles' 
roughness seemed now-a-days more obtrusive by con- 
trast with the pleasant manners of the people with 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 33 

whom, by the accident of her friendship with Egidia, 
she had been almost daily thrown into contact. This 
had been her farewell visit. Egidia was going back 
to town; but, in the course of many and many a 
long talk, she had sown a plentiful crop of ideas 
in this wayward head a seed whose harvest was to 
prove a very different one to that which she had 
expected. 

Mortimer Elles was not seriously discomposed by 
his wife's remark. "That's a nice remark to make 
to a man!" was his not ungentle rejoinder. He had 
ceased to expect Phoabe to curb any expression of 
opinion out of respect to his feelings, and in return 
permitted himself his full measure of brutality towards 
her. 

"Well, aren't they?" she repeated, yawning; "when 
is Charles going to pass his examination and relieve 
us of his presence? I did not bargain for Charles as 
a permanent lodger when I married you, nor Aunt 
Poynder indeed, for that matter, but I suppose all is 
for the worst, in this dreariest of all possible house- 
holds!" 

She expected no answer. These two always 
wrangled at cross purposes. There was very seldom 
a positive engagement between them. Mrs. Elles 
knew that Charles could not leave just yet, knew, 
too, that Mrs. Poynder would never go, was not posi- 
tively sure that she wanted her to go, but just now, 
when her normal state of discontent was quadrupled 
by the new influences that had lately come into her 



34 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

life, she could not resist a repetition of an oft- 
repeated complaint. 

She went on in a soft but irritating voice. 

"I have no objection to Aunt Poynder's engaging 
all the servants and managing them, but I must say I 
wish she would let Jane alone. I have reserved the right 
of choosing my own parlour-maid, and when I have 
succeeded in getting one that suits me, I don't want 
her bullied and the place made impossible for her." 

"Who bullies her? An idle, good-for-nothing trol- 
lop of a creature." 

"There, you see, you don't like her." 

"No, I don't," he replied brutally. "I don't like 
her style. She copies you, and you're not a par- 
ticularly good model." 

"Ah, how miserable I am!" she exclaimed, irrele- 
vantly. "Mortimer, tell me, why can't we get on? 
It is not my fault, is it?" 

"Oh ! no," he replied ironically. "You are always 
in the right. There is nothing more tiresome in a 
woman." 

"You are frank, Mortimer, and almost epigram- 
matic!" 

\ 

"Shut up, can't you?" he exclaimed, in accents of 
annoyance. "I wonder why it is that you always con- 
trive to rub me up the wrong way. Here you are 
abusing me abusing my relations why can't you 
let them alone? I don't abuse yours." 

"Mine are all dead!" she said, pathetically. 
"Fair game for you!" 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 35 

"And a nice lot they were!" said the man, now 
thoroughly roused to ill-temper. "That is, if you 
have told me the truth about them. You're pretty 
good at drawing the long bow, you know." 

At this point in the discussion, Mrs. Elles with- 
drew. Her relations were or had been a weak 
point, and Mortimer had suffered in his purse 
from claims of a ne'er-do-well father-in-law, and 
a foolish, extravagant mother. Phoebe had been 
brought up badly as a child, had been neglected in 
her girlhood, and her marriage with Mortimer Elles 
had been the making of her as her people said, and 
as she had agreed at the time but it was a grievance 
with her that, try as she might, she could not give 
her history a romantic turn in her husband's eyes. He 
knew all about her, was full of preconceived notions 
about her, arid she resented the impossibility of keep- 
ing up a consistent pose with him, being one of those 
who reverse the proverb and expect to be heroes to 
their valets de chambre and heroines to their husbands. 

This weakness of hers entailed the other weakness 
to which her husband had alluded her consistent 
ambiguity of phrase, her frequent lapses from truth. 
These lapses were for the most part unconscious, they 
were the good face she put on every matter, her 
artistic presentment of incidents relating to herself 
and* other people, for, to do her justice, she applied 
the same method to her fellow-creatures, and was 
never known to retail a spiteful or unpicturesque 
version of another woman's affairs. 



36 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

She considered herself the soul of honour, it is 
true ; she literally would not have told a lie to save her 
life ; but to save her pose and her dramatic present- 
ment from discomfiture, she shrank from no form of 
embellishment or extenuation. So she "doctored" 
facts served up the plain "roast and boiled" of every- 
day existence with a sauce piquante of her own 
devising, and thought of herself as one who, compass- 
ing under difficulties the whole duty of woman, 
makes herself as charming, as romantic, as mysteri- 
ous as circumstances will allow. 

Half an hour later she looked into the study, 
where Mortimer was sitting, a revolting picture of 
middle-class ease, with his legs on the table, drinking 
whisky and water. 

"I thought I heard someone crying?" 

"So you did. Jane. I have told her to go." 

"What?" she screamed. 

"Yes; we've had a row, Jane and I. I have sent 
her packing. I paid her her wages told her to pack 
up and go not later than to-morrow. She was 
cheeky to me you teach them all to be damned 
cheeky to me and I won't stand it." He filled his 
glass again, pouring with a want of precision that 
spoke of many previous attacks on the bottle. 

"Jane cannot have meant" his wife murmured 
humbly, cowed by the enormity of the misfortune that 
had befallen her. Jane was her ally, her confidante, 
her all. 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 37 

"Oh, yes; Jane meant it fast enough. Don't talk 
to me about it. To-morrow she goes!" 

He brought his fist heavily down upon the table. 
His wife started, a start partly real, partly affected. 

"If Jane goes, I go." 

"Nonsense, you are not a servant I have not dis- 
missed you!" 

"Dismiss !" She tossed her head. Then the real, 
imminent need of propitiating Mortimer occurred to 
her. She must keep Jane at the cost of all humili- 
ation. "Mortimer, listen it puts me out very much. 
I have a dinner party of twelve next week!" 

"The deuce you have ! "What a woman you are for 
kick-ups! And I don't suppose there is a soul com- 
ing that I shall care twopence for ! Well, you must 
put it off, that 'sail!" 

"One doesn't do these things!" 

"Oh, I do. I'll write the excuses for you, if you 
like." 

She stamped her foot. "Mortimer I will not be 
put to shame before my friends ! You have no right 
to do this to me! Oh, what shall I do, what shall I 
do, tied to a perfect beast like you for the rest of my 
life?" 

'Grin and bear it, I suppose. You won't make 
me any better by swearing at me!" 

"I don't swear at you! How you speak to me! 
To me! to me! Your wife! How dared you marry 
me, Mortimer?" 

"I don't know about dare," he said, growing red. 



38 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

"When all is said and done, I don't think you did 
much to prevent me!" 

"That's enough!" she raised her hand with a the- 
atrical gesture as if to stop him, and, sinking into an 
armchair, hid her face in her hands. "Insulting! 
No I see now you never loved me ! Never ! 
Never!" 

He ostentatiously turned his back on her tragic 
pose. 

"There you go! Always in extremes always 
injured always making the worst of it! You 
couldn't live without a grievance, I do believe ! Of 
course I married you for love if you must use the 
absurd word and now you pay me back by plaguing 
my life out! And then begin to talk damned senti- 
mental rot about my never having loved you, and so 
on! Now, really, don't you think we are both a bit 
too old for that sort of thing?" 

"Oh, you are impossible!" she moaned. It was 
what she felt. It was the one word which fitted the 
situation, which was no situation, except to herself. 
Mortimer kicked a coal out of the grate savagely with 
his carpet-slippered foot, and, her sense assaulted by 
the sickening smell of singed wool, she left the room. 

Mortimer was drunk he often was; it was the 
least heinous of his crimes. She went upstairs cry- 
ing, and went to bed, but she knew she could not 
sleep that night, and yet she took no bromide or sul- 
phonal. She wanted to think she meant to think 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 39 

things out so she lay, and thought, and thought, 
with extreme intensity and vigour, if with little 
coherence. So intent was she that she lay quite 
straight out and still, and did not toss, while the 
trains of thought succeeded each other with extraor- 
dinary rapidity. The tall clock on the stairs out- 
side her door ticked loudly and monotonously, and 
the whole problem of her life arrayed itself and 
measured out its phases to the beat of the pendulum, 
which seemed to balance them, as it were. 

Mortimer was impossible! He had always been 
impossible ! His conduct this evening was of a piece 
with his whole conduct to her, ever since a few weeks 
after marriage. Halcyon weeks, which every woman 
has a right to expect, while they in no wise concern 
or affect the life that follows after. His taunt about 
the circumstances of her marriage to him she dis- 
missed, she knew quite well that she had provoked 
him to it, he had not meant it, there was no founda- 
tion for it. He had wooed and won her in the usual, 
commonplace way, been timid and attentive, and had 
begged her for locks of her hair. And she had been 
complaisant and loving, and had treasured his photo- 
graph and made excuses for its ugliness, just like any 
other foolish girl with her first sweetheart. 

Why had she done all this? Why had she bought 
that rose-coloured satin dress last Christmas, that she 
had taken such a dislike to, since, that she had only 
worn it twice? Her marriage was a very nearly par- 
allel case, only she had been able to afford to throw 



40 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

aside the one bad bargain, and she had been obliged 
to abide by the other. 

"Yes, I can't say I did not know my own mind, 
such as it was, when I took Mortimer, but, unfortu- 
nately, it isn't the same mind that I have now. It 
was a child's mind. The whole fabric of our bodies 
alters every seven years, they say well, that means 
our minds, too body and soul are one in my creed. 
It was not this me that was glad to marry Mortimer, 
as he so politely put it " she laughed bitterly. "It 
was another me, who had not read Ibsen." She 
laughed again. "Books alter one reading alters one 
life alters one, after all ! I married Mortimer like 
a blind puppy, not knowing, not seeing. I am noth- 
ing wonderful, but I do think I am too good for him ! 
Why did I not see it then? Why is a girl such a 
fool? Why does nobody tell her? It is very hard. 
They say, as one has made one's bed, so one must lie 
on it. ... But suppose I decline to lie on it?" 

She almost leaped in her bed with the shock of this 
crude presentment of a new idea. Then she rose, 
lit a candle and walked out of her room, and across a 
landing, and straight into Mortimer's room. She 
Boftly approached the bed on which he lay, and, like 
Psyche over again, held the light up on high, and 
looked critically down upon her sleeping husband. 

She felt an indefinable pleasure in thus surveying 
him helpless who was technically her master. This 
coarse, clumsy-fibred creature who had yet his full 
complement of the shrewdness and acuteness that 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 41 

gave him dominion over his fellow-men, and made 
him known as a "tough customer" in business, slept 
the sleep well, if not precisely that of the just, at any 
rate that of the man whose balance at his bank is 
secure and his investment sound. He slept like a 
savage who has laid aside his clubs, and enjoys the 
dreamless, primitive sleep that he has earned by his 
feats of arms. His thick, broad eyelids rested peace- 
fully on the cold, blue eyes whose empty glare his 
wife knew and detested. His. lips were closed on his 
cruel little teeth in a firm, inexpressive line, pacific 
and meaningless, and his clumsy hands, with their 
short, square-nailed finger tips, lay palm outwards on 
the coverlet, as innocently as a child's. 

She might stare at him as long as she pleased, with 
those burning, insistent eyes of hers, and not fear to 
break his sleep; his simple nervous system would 
surely withstand the hypnotism of her enquiring 
gaze. 

But next morning, he would be "all there" as 
usual ; the hectoring, bantering, exacerbating person- 
ality would re-assert itself, and make its hundred and 
one demands on her self-control all through the day, 
till sometimes it seemed as if she could not look at 
him or hear his voice without screaming. 

"Why should I bear it? Why should I?" she 
asked herself, passionately, aloud; and the pettish 
exclamation was significant of the great revulsion that 
was taking place in her, a result of the passionate, 
elucidating fortnight she had passed. 



42 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

She went back to her room and lay down again, 
but she closed her eyes no more that night, and by 
the time the pallid dawn of Newcastle had begun to 
filter through the window curtains, a whole plan of 
action had shaped itself in her mind. She came 
down punctually to the eight o'clock breakfast which 
was exacted by Mortimer and which he had never 
allowed her to forego, putting some constraint on her- 
self to appear perfectly composed, for her heart was 
beating violently, and she felt the suspicious flush 
mounting to her cheek, which had so often given 
unkind friends occasion to say that she painted. 
But Mrs. Poynder, who was presiding over the tea 
and coffee, looked her over with some approval. 

"Now, that's the first decent dress I have seen you 
in, Fibby, for many a long day!" she observed, con- 
templating the plain dress of blue serge not very 
new, not very smart in which Mrs. Elles had chosen 
to array herself. 

"I am glad you are pleased, Aunt Poynder," replied 
her niece, demurely, gracefully accepting her cup of 
coffee from the stout, red fingers where the sub- 
merged wedding-ring, planted there by the late Mr. 
Poynder, glittered. Charles Elles, who could get 
more noise out of a cup of coffee than anybody, was 
drinking his and enjoying it thoroughly. Mrs. 
Poynder somehow contrived to knock her knife and 
fork together on the rim of her plate with vigour 
every time she took a morsel. Mortimer's carpet 
slippers, and the dish of bacon which his aunt had 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 43 

set down by the fire to keep warm for him, stood by 
the fire in grotesque proximity. 

"I am going to put off my dinner on the thirty- 
first," Mrs. Elles announced, quietly. "Jane is 
going, and I couldn't attempt it with a new parlour- 
maid." 

"I am glad, Fibby, to see you in such a peaceable 
frame of mind," Mrs. Poynder rejoined. "Morti- 
mer says yon. were fairly put out at. first about his 
sending Jane away." 

"So I was, Aunt, but " 

"Ye're quite right, Fibby, to take it calm. Hus- 
bands must have their way. I never thought much 
of the girl myself; she's lazy and wears far too much 
fringe. Besides, a man must be master in his own 
house, and if he can't send away his own housemaid 
when it pleases him " 

"Yes, Aunt." Mrs. Elles was playing at meek- 
ness, and the sensation was so unusual that she found 
it rather amusing so far. Mrs. Poynder could not 
make it out at all. 

"Are ye ill, my dear?" she enquired, with some 
show of solicitude. "To look at ye, I should say 
that your digestion was not in just apple-pie order." 
'I am all right, Aunt," replied Mrs. Elles, with 
forced composure, stamping her foot, however, under 
the table. Her colour was high, as Mrs. Poynder had 
remarked, but very clear and bright, and she looked 
quite ten years younger. Her aunt continued to 
make little onslaughts of this kind on her through 



44 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

breakfast, but she did not retort. Her lips formed 
themselves every now and again into the words, "I 
am going I am going I am going!" as a kind of 
secret satisfaction. When her husband came down, 
she actually got up and fetched the terribly plebeian 
dish of bacon from the fender and put it down in 
front of him. He thanked her drily. 

"If you will excuse me," she said to them all, "I 
will go and write some notes that have to be attended 
to at once." 

She left the room, and the scratching of a feverish 
pen within the drawing-room was heard for the next 
twenty minutes through the open door, while Morti- 
mer Elles, having eaten an enormous breakfast in the 
short time he had devoted to that purpose, went into 
the hall and began to rummage for his stick and hat 
and struggle into his coat. His wife knew the sound 
well. 

"Good-bye, Mortimer!" she called out. There 
was a slight suspicion of mockery in her tone that he 
perceived and resented. He did not answer her, but 
went out, banging the door behind him loudly and 
aggressively. 

"Helmer bangs the door; not Nora!" she smiled to 
herself. She felt extraordinarily gay. The more 
serious aspects of the step she was taking were not 
obvious to her at the present moment. She was for 
the time merely possessed by an irrepressible zeal for 
the assertion of self, and its disassociation from all 
trammelling human responsibilities. 



45 



Presently Mrs. Poynder went out too, to attend 
some Busy bodies' committee meeting, and Mrs. Elles 
took three five-pound notes out of a drawer in her 
desk, locked it, and, going downstairs, ordered lunch 
and dinner very carefully. This duty accomplished, 
she went up to her room, and presented Jane, whom 
she found there, with a very handsome cloth dress 
she had hardly worn, and her blessing. The affec- 
tionate and devoted Jane wept, and it was with diffi- 
culty that her mistress prevented herself from crying 
too. 

Then Jane went about her business, and Mrs. Elles 
locked herself in. She undid the complicated 
arrangement of her hair and with a comb parted it as 
severely as she could resign herself to do, and with a 
brush dipped in water smoothed out the little curls 
on her forehead, sighing deeply the while. Then she 
went to a cupboard, and from its most recondite 
recesses produced a box containing a pah* of blue 
spectacles her husband's. She put them on, and 
standing resolutely in front of a cheval glass, surveyed 
her appearance. 

"Good God, can I bear it?" she said aloud, in 
tones of the very deepest anguish. Her face grew 
sombre for the first time since the conception of flight 
had become an established fact in her mind. She 
desperately tugged down a lock and disposed it 
becomingly on her forehead as usual, and then put it 
back again. 

"No! , Yes! . . I must do it like this. . . . 



46 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

It is the only way I can do it without blame. ... It 
shows that my intentions are honourable. ... I am 
going away to be free, not to flirt. ... I must make 
all that an absolute impossibility!" 

She flung a lace scarf over the glass and busied her- 
self with a few necessary preparations. She got out 
a Gladstone bag just the size she could manage to 
carry herself and threw in a few clothes, including a 
fine white muslin dress she had worn at her "at 
home" that day, so fine that it would go through a 
ring almost and took up no room to speak of. A 
rather valuable sapphire ring she put on her finger, 
and on second thoughts added a diamond one. Then 
she opened the door of her room, and leaning over the 
banisters called out, "Jane!" 

Jane replied. 

"Jane, will you go and draw down those blinds in 
the drawing-room all of them half down. The 
sun is getting so strong. And then, will you take 
the heap of letters you will see lying on the bureau, 
and go and post them at once." 

She put on a sailor hat and a white lace veil over 
her blue spectacles, and was downstairs and out in the 
street before Jane had got to the fourth blind of the 
drawing-room, which happened to look out on the 
back of the house. Nora was gone ! 



CHAPTER III 

Mrs. Elles took a ticket for London. The train 
was due to leave in ten minutes. She was out of 
breath and felt the compromising colour mounting to 
her cheeks under her thick white veil. The young poet 
was on the platform, apparently seeing Miss Drum- 
mond off. Phoebe Elles smiled at the little love 
drama here developing. It would have been hers to 
further it if she had been staying at home, for she 
was a born matchmaker with a very kind heart and 
dearly loved helping people, from a variety of motives. 
But for the moment she had something else to do. 
She got quickly into her carriage. The poet had 
glanced at her, but had, of course, soon averted his 
gaze from such an uninteresting object as the pretty 
Mrs. Elles now presented. 

Atalanta Drummond was probably only going as 
far as Darlington, where, as everybody knew, she had 
relations. But still her presence in the same train 
was a dangerous and delightful fact. Mrs. Elles felt 
all the exhilaration of a superior criminal evading the 
pursuit of justice and forthwith planned to play an 
exciting game of hide-and-seek with her unwitting 
fellow-traveller. She would manoeuvre the most 
carefully-arranged, hair-breadth escapes from the 
unconscious pursuer. How nice it was to be running 

47 



48 



away, so to speak, and how it at once removed every- 
thing from the region of the commonplace ! 

She got out of her carriage at Darlington, and 
looked about the great station. She was one of those 
persons in whom the mere sight of a telegraph office 
immediately inspires a desire to send a message of 
some sort, and she at once went into the bureau and 
proceeded to compose a wire to Mortimer. 

"Gone away for the present; do not be anxious 
about me. Phcebe." Then she crossed out "for the 
present" and substituted "for a change." 

"I don't want him to be dragging the Tyne for 
me!" she thought. "That is, if his affection for me 
should prompt him to such an extreme course, which 
I do not think it would." 

When she got back to her carriage, a porter was 
engaged in putting some effects into the rack, which 
she at once recognized as belonging to Miss Drum- 
mond. In spite of her plans, terror then filled her 
soul. Had that young lady recognized her? Was 
she intending to join her for the pleasure of her com- 
pany? Or was it only because this was a through 
carriage to London? 

The poor, hunted creature dared not stay to ascer- 
tain, but, seizing her bag, jumped out and searched 
wildly for another compartment. She was bewildered 
and uncertain. Nobody helped her or took any 
interest in her, because she was unattractive, so she 
thought, and the end of it was that the London train 
moved on without her, as trains will. 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 49 

She watched it steaming out of the station, but she 
was far too much excited to care. There happened 
to be another train, just like it, on the other side 
of the station, about to go westwards to Barnard 
Castle. 

"Scott's Eokeby!" she said to herself. Scott was 
not one of her modern gods, but still the names 
famous and familiar to everyone "Brignal Banks" 
and Greta Bridge had a certain old-world magic of 
their own. So, acting on the inspiration of the 
moment, she took a ticket for Barnard Castle, and 
at twelve o'clock found herself in the market-place 
of the sleepy little town on the Tees, in front of a 
char-a-banc full of tourists just starting for Rokeby, 
four miles off. She took a seat. 

Once arrived there, she declined to make the tour 
of the famous Park with a guide and a noisy party of 
barbarians, with fern-leaves artlessly stuck behind 
their ears, but, leaving her bag in charge of the 
obliging porter at the gates, whom the more effectu- 
ally to cajole she took off her spectacles for a second, 
started on a voyage of discovery in the opposite direc- 
tion, across the bridge, following the course of the 
Greta, along a cart track in a wood, to the east. She 
did not in the least know where this path would lead 
her; she only knew that she was extremely happy. 
She felt just as she imagined the young journeyman 
heroes in the tales of Grimm must have felt when 
they walked, knapsack in hand, to seek their for- 
tunes. She walked with an assured step, she sang to 



50 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

herself, she listened to the jubilant song of the mount- 
ing larks that came from the fields on the other side 
of the river, she enjoyed the country as only a town- 
bred person can ; she actually experienced the joy of 
life she had read about so often. "I have not seen 
enough of nature!" she said to herself, as one says of 
a friend who lives a long way off, and whom one has 
somehow neglected. Tags of poetry, scraps of phi- 
losophy, queer mythological ideas, born of her miscel- 
laneous reading, about the Earth Mother and the 
Earth Spirit, passed through her mind. What a 
terribly artificial life it was that she had been leading ! 
Nature was the real thing after all ! 

And meantime, at home in smoky, sophisticated 
Newcastle, Mortimer and Mrs. Poynder and Charles 
would be sitting down to the substantial midday meal 
that their souls loved, and that she had carefully 
ordered for them before she left, as a valedictory 
service. She pictured the complacent three, pent up 
in the hideous, stuffy dining-room (Mortimer's taste 
she was only permitted jurisdiction over the draw- 
ing-room), with all the windows fast closed down in 
accordance with that innate dislike of fresh air inher- 
ent in some persons, and a blazing fire for the crown 
of discomfort. 

She, whose spiritual needs were being so thoroughly 
satisfied, for once, was not in the least materially 
hungry, and, if she became so, would eat roots like 
other heroines before her. There must be plenty of 
things edible in this luxuriance of undergrowth in 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 51 

which she was wandering, where all possible forms of 
vegetable life seemed literally crushing one another 
out in their mutual excess and exuberance. There 
were great, flame-coloured fungi glistering from the 
boles of enormous beech trees whose leaves grew so 
closely that, althougth he hot July sun, she knew, 
was beating outside on their thick panopoly, she yet 
was able to walk at ease in their cool penumbra. Beds 
of magnificent nettles, and the broad, green discs of 
what the children call "fairy tables" filled all the hol- 
lows of the dells. Here and there, tall -stemmed, 
pale lilac campanulas rose and lightened the gloom 
through which the sunbeams pierced in vivid streaks, 
like golden spears probing the dimness. The low 
bank of red sandstone that formed the background to 
the grove showed at intervals like a rosy wall, but on 
the opposite side the character of the country had 
changed; there were no more meadows; she was 
hemmed in ; the granite cliff rose sheer, clothed with 
trees that found but a scanty purchase in the rocky 
clefts to which they seemed to cling frantically with 
hoary roots upturned, detached almost, the relative 
positions of roots and boughs nearly reversed. The 
call of the wood-pigeons that nested in these coverts 
she sentimentally called them doves came to her 
across the river that flowed along beside her, red like 
wine, over shiny stones and deep, rocky crevices that 
modified the sound of its ripples into a thousand 
musical varieties. 

She was in an ecstasy. To herself she murmured, 



52 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

softly, Eossetti's lines about the "Banks in Willow 
Wood": 

" With woodspnrge wan, with bloodwort burning 

red" 

and was in a mood to utter invocations to the "spotted 
snakes, with double tongue," that must be lurking 
in those dark beds of hoary nettles. She was a well- 
read woman, and had her poets at her fingers' ends, 
for use, not ornament, since she BO frequently quoted 
them. She walked on, imagining that she heard the 
interesting rustle of wild animals that her footsteps 
affrighted, and presently, out of pure caprice, left the 
path and began to clamber up the bank, in the vague 
aspiration after blackberries in July. 

The dell began to widen out, and the river, which 
up to that time had flowed in a more or less massive 
and self-contained flood, began to spread and lose 
itself in shallows. The noise of many counter -ripples, 
of the suction of large masses of water pouring into 
crevices and over many different levels, grew very 
loud. She stood, as it were, at the end of a funnel, 
looking towards a sunlit clearing where the trees grew 
more thinly and more interspersedly, and the cliffs 
stood away on either side. 

She stopped and stood still, and pushed her spec- 
tacles, which she had been wearing very laxly, a little 
further up her forehead. 

"This is like a glimpse of Paradise," she thought, 
looking towards the golden space in front of her, 
"coming as it does, just after this long, cool dark 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 53 



grove that I have been walking in for more than half an 
hour! That was a kind of Pur gator io. This is a painter's 
paradise, I might say, and there is the painter !" 

For very nearly under her feet she was half-way 
up the sloping bank that sheltered this little oasis on 
the south was the white calico umbrella planted on 
its spiked stick, like a gigantic mushroom, which 
Mrs. Elles was well-informed enough to associate 
at once with the painter's craft. 

The painter was, of course, seated on his campstool 
under it, and she looked down on the back of his sun- 
burnt neck and noticed the way his hair curled a 
little on it. One rash step would bring her 
down on him in a helpless rush, for she was not an 
expert climber and her steps were rendered precarious 
by the crumbly nature of the soil on which she stood. 

She settled her spectacles firmly on her nose "I 
shall probably fall and break them into my eyes, but 
it can't be helped!" and began to skirt round to the 
left, intending to make a circuit of the umbrella and 
approach the artist from the front. She had a wild 
desire to speak to someone. She had actually not 
opened her lips since ten o'clock that morning, and 
she was a woman hardly cast by nature for the part 
of a Trappist ! In this lonely place, the least a man 
could do would be to wish her good day ! Then she 
might possibly go so far as to ask him to tell her the 
name of the place where she found herself, and a 
pleasant conversation would thereby be inaugurated. 

She worked gradually round to him how ugly the 



54 



world looked through the wall of cold blue in front of 
her eyes! and the continuous ripple of the water, 
flowing over the many obstacles and narrow channels 
of its bed, effectually drowned the noise of the snap- 
ping of dry twigs and the breaking of pulpy burdock 
stalks that attended her clumsy progress. 

She was almost in front of him a few yards off 
only but he had not raised his head. He did so 
presently, in the natural course of things, and she 
made a step forward. 

"For God's sake, mind that foxglove!" he shouted, 
but, even as he spoke, it was doomed and the splendid 
column of pink bells fell prone to the ground. She 
stood aghast. 

"I beg your pardon!' 1 he said, in a tone as civil as 
was consistent with the most obvious and excessive 
irritation, "but do you know you have completely 
ruined my foreground?" 

"I beg your pardon oh, ten thousand times!" she 
replied, ruefully surveying the snapped stem of the 
injured flower. "But it will grow again, won't it?" 

"Not that one not this summer and it came in 
just right! Well, well; it can't be helped. . . . 
Please don't apologise! . . . It is no matter." 

But she continued to apologise, and he to beg her 
not to do so. The voice in which she conveyed her 
protestations, however, became more and more feeble. 
The hot sun was beating down on her head as she 
stood, and she was conscious of an overpowering 
faintness and desire to sink down on the desecrated 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 55 

bed of foxgloves and rest; but she felt also very 
strongly that she must resist and conquer the impulse 
until she could remove herself to a place beyond the 
artist's proximity. 

"You seem faint," she heard him saying, and his 
voice, grown gentle now, seemed to come from miles 
away. "Sit down on this!" and he hastily emptied a 
bulgy canvas sketching bag and laid it down beside 
her. "Now shall I get you some water?" 

She was so really ill that she could only nod in re- 
sponse to his offer. 

"I have no glass," he said; "but this little thing 
will be quite clean when I have washed it out." He 
took the japanned tin attached to his water-colour 
paint box, and ran down to the river to fill it. She 
watched him. 

"How nice of him!" she thought to herself; "and 
I was just thinking him such a bear; and I spoiled 
his poor foxglove; and I am so hungry!" 

There were several crusts of dry bread lying about 
which he had thrown out of the canvas bag how dry 
she dared not think, but she put out her hand and 
nibbled at one. 

"Good Heavens, you must not eat that!" he said, 
when he came back, raising his eyebrows. His eyes 
were quite dark, though his hair was grey. "Mrs. 
Watson put some sandwiches into my bag this morn- 
ing, but I regret to say I ate them all half-an-hour 
ago ! I generally take them back with me untouched. 
How unlucky!" 



56 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

He raised his voice and called, and after a time a 
lubberly boy came slouching up. 

"Now, Billy Gale, where the devil have you been? 
What is the good of you? Go up to the cottage and 
ask them for a glass of milk and a slice of bread-and- 
butter on a plate, mind!" 

The boy was off, and he turned to Mrs. Elles, who 
had drunk her cool, pure river water, and was looking 
less pale. 

"You are very kind to me," she murmured, "and 
I know how you must hate being interrupted ! Please 
do go on painting now as if I were not here. I won't 
say a single word, and, as soon as I am a little rested, 
I will go away and leave you in peace. ... I am 
very fond of art!" she added, inconsequently. "I 
used to do a little myself." 

But the artist seemed to have taken her at her word, 
and she did not think he could have heard her, as he 
sat complacently dabbling his brush in the little 
water-tin, now restored to its proper use, and then 
put it to his lips, and then touched his paper with it. 
There was no colour in the brush, and no particular 
effect upon the paper, so it seemed to the ignorant 
tyro at his side. In spite of her promise of silence, 
she could not resist pointing this out to him. 

"Don't be too sure, "he said; "every touch counts." 

"I do wish I might have a look at it!" 

She was quite unprepared for the terrible frown 
that appeared on his mild countenance when she pre- 
ferred this innocent-seeming request. 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 57 

"You must excuse me, please. I cannot bear to 
show my things before they are done. I could never 
work at them again if I did. It is a peculiarity of 
mine dreadful, but here is Billy ! I am afraid he 
will have spilt most of the milk by the time he gets 
here." 

"Mr. Elvers, sir," said the boy, as soon as he got 
within earshot, "Farmer says as one o' they little 
black pigs you knows 'em, sir ?" 

"Intimately, every one of them, " replied the artist, 
bitterly. "It's your business to keep them off me, 
you young villain, and instead of that you go and let 
them rout about in my colour box " 

"That's just it, sir," Billy answered, grinning joy- 
fully ; one of 'em has died suddent-like, and Farmer 
says as how it died along of eating those little sticky 
things o' yourn that squeedge in and out." 

* ' One of my oil-colour tubes ! What nonsense ! Just 
go and tell Mr. Ward no, stop; I'll speak to him 
myself, later." He turned and laughed at Mrs. Elles 
very pleasantly. "What an absurd thing! But I 
certainly have missed my Naples yellow, lately." 

She laughed too. "Now I have heard your name, ' ' 
she said. 

"Edmund Eivera." 

"Yes, Edmund Rivers, the famous landscape- 
painter you see I know all about your fame and I 
have a letter of yours in my pocket." 

As a matter of fact, she had not, she was thinking 
of the muslin dress she had worn days ago, into whose 



58 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

pocket she had thrust the autograph letter Egidia had 
given her. The dress was in her bag, lying at the 
Porter's lodge, a mile away. Still it sounded better. 
The artist luckily did not ask to see the letter, but 
looked puzzled, and a little displeased. 

"I collect autographs!" she went on hastily, "and 
Miss Giles Egidia, you know, the famous novelist 
gave it to me. She said she was a relation of yours. 
She is a great friend of mine, too. I am on my way 
to stay with her." 

"Oh, indeed!" he said, stiffly. 

"But I must ask you," she went on, clasping her 
hands together, "not to mention my name to her 
when you write, or even to say that you have seen 
me. Please promise?" 

"But, my dear madam, I don't know your name, 
and am never likely to." 

"Oh, yes; but indeed you must know my name," 
she said simply, "Miss Frick." 

It was a pseudonym adopted on the spur of the 
moment; she had known a German governess of the 
name. Once fairly launched in fiction she went on 
easily. 

"I am the daughter of a country clergyman, and 
he's very poor we are seven and we all earn our 
bread. It is a very strange story. My father married 
again, an odious woman none of us could live with. 
I did type-writing that is how I weakened my eyes 
and then I broke down, and I had to go into the 
country for my health." 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 59 

"I am very sorry to hear all this," said the artist, 
languidly. 

"Oh, not at all. And then there was a further 
complication there was a man, and he pestered me 
annoyed me molested me, in fact, till I got ill. 
It was not all the fault of the type- writing, you see" 
she had a wan, well-executed smile under her veil. 
"My life was a torment to me. He followed me 
about; he even threatened to shoot me! You may 
have read about it in the papers." 

"No, I never have." His voice betrayed no 
interest. 

"People do such dreadful things, sometimes!" she 
observed, vaguely, to Nature at large, for the artist 
had become quite absorbed in his work and seemed to 
be paying no attention to what she was saying. "He 
is all the time wishing me at the devil!" she thought 
to herself, but she did not go. She was perforce 
silent awhile, but took the opportunity to look closely 
at and focus this personage who had so completely 
filled up her field of vision. 

"He looks rather like a foreign sailor, such as one 
sees on the quays at Newcastle," she thought. " He 
only wants earrings to complete the effect. I suppose 
it is because he is so sunburnt, and his eyes are so 
dark. They are like brown pools like the river here, 
as if they grew like what they looked on. There 
are all sorts of little wrinkles round them not 
money wrinkles, as I always call Mortimer's but 
wrinkles that come of screwing up his eyes to see 



60 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

effects, and shutting one of them altogether now and 
then, as he is doing. He talks languidly, like a 
society man, as if everything was a bore, but then his 
eager eyes are all over the place. I like that greyish 
hair in so young a man it is 'a sable silvered,' as 
Hamlet said of his father. What a beautiful mouth ! 
It is like a woman's, and yet it is strong. His mous- 
tache hides it a good deal. Well, a mouth like that 
should not be too obvious to the vulgar eye. It tells 
too much. He is very thin. I wonder if he is deli- 
cate? No, not with a figure like that he must be 
strong, and his instep is beautifully arched that 
comes of springing about these rocks people grow 
flat-footed in Newcastle. ..." 

She started suddenly. 

"Why am I sitting here beside a strange man of 
whose existence I did not even know an hour ago? It 
is as if I had been here all my life ! I ought to go, 
of course, but where?" 

She looked round her distractedly. The sun had 
declined; the day had changed from morning to 
afternoon. She had been in this man's company for 
nearly two hours, without any excuse beyond her 
temporary faintness. She got up nervously, though 
he did not seem to notice her, and wandered a little 
way off across the meadow trying to collect her 
thoughts and make a plan. A curious brown ball 
lying at the foot of a wild rose tree attracted her 
attention. She picked it up and, with childish 
inconsequence, carried it back to the artist to ask him 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 61 

to tell her what it was. Suddenly it uncurled in her 
hand, and a tiny snout appeared in front of the 
bristles ! She dropped it with a modish scream, and 
the artist perforce raised his head. He saw the situ- 
ation at once, and smiled a little. There was a 
cynical twist in his mouth that delighted her. 

"Did you say you had been bred in the country?" 
he asked. 

"Why, what is it?" 

"Only a hedgehog a 'hodgeon," as they call them 
here. "Poor thing: it trusted you, you see, and 
uncurled itself!" 

"The darling; I must take it home." 

"I would," he said dryly, and looked at his watch. 
"Four o'clock ! I must go to my afternoon subject." 

Trembling with apprehension, she watched him as 
he took the sketching bag, and rammed his sketching 
things into it. He then summoned Billy to take 
down the umbrella and follow with it, and shoulder- 
ing the bag himself, raised his cap civilly, bade her 
good morning, and was gone. 

She sat there stupidly staring at the little yellow 
patch of trodden grass where his feet had rested, and 
his camp had been set. 

She was alone in the world again, a runaway wife, 
with all the problem of her life before her ! 

The obvious course was to get up and go; but 
where? To London? What did she care for London 
now? And anyhow, it was far too late to go on there 
that night! 



The smoke was rising from the chimneys of the 
cottage up there on the brow, whence Billy Gale had 
brought the milk. Was the artist staying there? 
She cast her eyes vaguely round her as if to ask the 
mild heavens for help, and saw the boy in the dis- 
tance, sitting kicking his heels about on a dry rock, 
in mid-stream, not far from his master, presumably ! 

Then she rose, having conceived a reckless plan of 
action which she felt the necessity of putting into 
execution at once ; for if she were to allow herself to 
think it over, she would never be able to bring her- 
self to do it at all. She beckoned to Billy Gale, 
and asked him to be so good as to direct her to Mr. 
Kivers' "afternoon subject" as she had heard him 
call it. 

The lad stared, but obediently led her to a place 
about a quarter of a mile further down the river, 
opposite a ruined church, and a church garth full of 
antique, wooden headstones, smothered in burdock 
leaves ; a scene of beautiful desolation. 

Mr. Rivers was standing, sketch book in hand, on 
a little beach of pebbles under the shelving, undercut 
bank, executing with incredible dexterity what 
looked like meaningless parabolic curves, with a hard 
lead pencil. His back was turned to her. She 
jumped down the bank, and, though the crunching 
of the pebbles under her feet, and the sound of her 
own voice, affrighted her, managed to pluck up cour- 
age to address him. 

"I must apologise for troubling you again but you 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 63 

were so very kind to me before perhaps you would 
not mind telling me if there is any if I could find 
any accommodation here?" 

"No, none!" he replied hastily, without even turn- 
ing round. 

After an appreciable pause he added, unwillingly, 
"At least there's an inn a mile off about a 
mile " 

"But that is what I mean!" she cried, joyfully. 
"And is that where you stop?" 

He turned on her a gaze of acute distress. 

"Oh, yes, I suppose so, but I warn you I, of 
course, can put up with anything it is very rough, 
very rough indeed. They are not good hands at 
cooking I have had a chop a day for the last fort- 
night. And the beds are very hard!" 

Here he shuddered somewhat elaborately. 

"I don't happen to mind that sort of thing at 
all." 

"I chose it for quiet," he went on, pathetically. 
"The landlady is a good soul, who understands my 
little ways, but " 

"That quite decides me " 

"They may have a room I am sure I don't know 
but I should advise you not " 

"I should not be in your way at all," she went on, 
barefacedly assuming her acquaintance with the 
remoter causes of his feeble degree of encouragement, 
and smiling sweetly into his blank face, "in fact, I 
should be a comfort to you I mean, I am very quiet, 



64 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

and if I occupy the room, no one else can, don't you 
see? I should at any rate serve to keep noisier people 
out." 

"There is something in that!" he observed, as if to 
himself. 

"So I will go along and see," she went on, pursuing 
her advantage. 

"My lad can show you a short cut over the river," 
was the painter's unexpected rejoinder. She was not 
deceived by his mildness. He only wanted to get rid 
of her, and the moment he had spoken he turned 
round and resumed his drawing again. 

"Delightful, but not quite human," she thought 
to herself. 

His "lad," with frank confidence in her power of 
accommodation to somewhat unusual methods of pro- 
gression, piloted her across the river by way of a 
rough bridge of stepping stones, apparently half 
natural, half artificial, and then led her by many a 
varied and devious track, through a succession of 
brambly coppices, and over many stiles of many pat- 
terns, tantalizing enough to a town-bred woman. 
She enjoyed it, however, and was proud of her newly- 
discovered powers, as she surmounted one unusual 
impediment after another, and was as quick about it 
as the long-legged country lad who guided her. Then 
they crossed a couple of upland pastures where the 
great, mild-eyed cows were grazing, and half -turning 
their heads to look at her and Billy Gale, who left 
her no time to be afraid of them, and at last the 



THE HUMAN INTEKEST 65 

slender smoke spirals from the chimneys of a little 
homestead rose in sight. 

"The Heather Bell" was an old-fashioned coaching 
inn on the outskirts of the great park of Eokeby, and 
opposite one of its gates. The enormous beech trees 
leaned over the high Park wall and shadowed the inn 
that was only separated from it by the width of the 
road, and whose windows were darkened at noonday 
by their shade. The inn itself was a large, straggling 
building, with a low-pitched, tiled roof covered with 
houseleek. A bushy, garish-coloured garden on the 
south side, full of flowers, reached to where the fields 
ended. A woman was standing under the rose-hung 
porch, shading her eyes with her hand. 

"Yon 'a the Mistress!" said Billy Gale, suddenly, 
"and she owes me a skelping, so I think I'll just 
mak' myself skarse!" He bolted, and just in time, 
for the landlady came striding up the garden path 
with obviously less zeal for the welcoming of the 
guest than for Billy Gale's discomfiture. 

"Little, idle good-f or -nought!" exclaimed she, 
shaking her fist in the direction of his recalcitrant 
back. "Is this the proper way for to bring fowk 
in? What's the front entrance for? Good morning, 
Mem. Coom in this way, since ye are here!" 

Mrs. Elles asked for a bedroom, and was told that 
she could have one. 

"It's a bit smarl, but ye 're no very big yersel'," 
said the landlady, tenderly patronizing her already. 
People always did. "Coom, an' I'se show ye! . . . 



66 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

Ye'll be a penter, too, will ye?" she enquired, on the 
way upstairs. "Lord love ye, there's heaps on 'em 
cooms here! It's a fine place for such as them! 
There's the Joonction the Greta and the Tees, ye 
know, and the Dairy Bridge and Mortham Tower, 
they're all bonnie ye'se find plenty for to ockipy ye 
here. We've got a grand artiss here now. . . . 
That's his room, see ye, next yours ye'll mebbies 
have seen his pectewers in Lunnon, Mem?" 

"Miss," corrected Mrs. Elles. 

"He's a permanent lodger like. It's a matter o' 
ten year since he first coomed here, seeking rooms. I 
seed he was a painter lad at onst, and I says to my 
man I had a man then 'Tak' him, George, and 
ye'll ne'er repent it ! He'll be out a' the day long a 
dirtying o' bits of nice clean paper, and amusing his- 
self, and no trouble at all!' . . . Well, he'll be in 
soon to his bit denner. Ye'll be having a chop to 
yer tea, along of he?" 

"Oh, but can't I have a sitting-room of my own?" 

"Nay, we haven't another setting-room, honey. 
There's only the big meetin'-room, ye know 'tis only 
fit for picnic parties, and sich like but Mr. Eivers 
is a nice quiet body; he'll not be in your way, I 
promise ye." 

But Mrs. Elles, whatever her private wishes might 
have been, was resolved not to have any appearance 
of intruding on the hermit painter ; and six o'clock 
for she was ridiculously, unromantically hungry 
found her established at a corner of a long-rudimen- 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 67 

tary, wooden table, built on trestles, that ran the 
whole length of a bare, barn-like room, evidently a 
recent addition to the comfortable old coaching inn, 
for it was high-pitched, with three tall sash windows, 
and the walls distempered in French grey. The floor 
was sanded, and its raftered ceiling was not free from 
spiders, that ever and anon made terrifying voyages 
of discovery down their shadowy webs to the end of 
the long table that was spread with a coarse, white 
cloth for her benefit. 

She was struck, amid all this roughness and rusticity, 
with the white, well-tended hands that served her. 
It was not a servant who stood behind her chair, and 
who was continually addressed from afar by the land- 
lady as "Jane Anne!" Jane Anne was a short, thick- 
set young woman in a well-made black dress, and an 
opulent watch-chain. Mrs. Elles did not like her 
face, with its heavy chin and sullen eyes and masses 
of crisped black hair parted carefully on a low fore- 
head, or the mincing Cockney pronunciation, grafted 
on a native Yorkshire accent, with which the girl 
answered the trifling questions she asked her. She 
wore no cap or apron, and performed her service with 
a silent concentration which showed that it was not 
her usual vocation. To all Mrs. Elles' remarks she 
replied civilly, but with a suggestion of closure in 
each answer. Mrs. Elles took a strong dislike to her 
at once. 

The three windows of the room opened on to the 
garden, the main path of which led by a slight 



68 THE HUMAN INTEEEST 

upward gradient to the wicket gate and the series of 
upland pastures which she had traversed a few hours 
before on her way back from Brignal. That, she had 
ascertained, was the name of the place where she had 
first met Mr. Eivers. He must surely be even now 
crossing them on his way home from his work. She 
went across to the window and leaned out, and gazed 
disconsolately towards the empty sunset sky. 

Two pretty brown cows were leaning over and rub- 
bing their noses against the stumps of the gate, lowing 
gently for human sympathy. Suddenly their heads 
were persuasively pushed aside, and the painter ap- 
peared, silhouetted against the saffron background. 
He stroked them, and then coming through, closed 
the gate carefully against their obtrusive noses. Mrs. 
Elles watched him as he walked down the path, 
pebbly and uneven with the washing down of previous 
heavy rains, between the low espalier pear trees, and 
disappeared under the porch a few yards to the left. 
Then, with a little suppressed sigh, she withdrew her 
gaze from the gleaming sky and turned sharply, to 
find the body of the girl who had waited on her at 
dinner in close proximity to her own. 

The girl had evidently been watching the painter's 
entry, too, over her unsuspecting' shoulders. Mrs. 
Elles conceived a violent dislike to her, which, in her 
wilful way, she was at no pains to hide. 

Everybody here seemed to be attached to Mr. 
Eivers. Through the open door of the room, she 
heard the landlady's ecstatic welcome to him as he 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 69 

passed under the rose-hung porch of the "Heather 
Bell." "Well, and here ye coom, sir!" as of one 
receiving a cherished lamb back into the fold. 
Presently, the listening woman heard him walk 
wearily into his sitting-room it happened to be next 
door to the kind of annex in which she was and 
close the door. 

She now felt strangely and unutterably lonely. 
What had she come here for? During the rest of the 
evening, she sat in a hard cane chair by the window, 
and leaned her elbow on the equally hard stone sill. 
The light slowly faded out of the sky and the scent of 
the nightstocks came to her in sweet, overpowering 
wafts, and the evening primroses opened wider and 
wider till they seemed to shine like yellow moons in 
the dusky garden beds. Then the real moon came 
out, and still she could smell nothing but the sweet 
smells of the garden and she wondered whether Mr. 
Kivers would begin to smoke enormous strong cigars 
or a horrid pipe, like Mortimer, and thus kill all 
the poetry of the evening. His window was next 
to the one out of which she was now leaning, and it 
was wide open. Her window was raw and square, 
his was smothered in the leaves of an immense pear 
which she had noticed as she came in, growing, in 
stiffly arranged branches like a genealogical tree, all 
over the southern side of the house. 

No, he was not smoking! What was he doing? 
She suddenly conceived the notion of going out of 
doors of taking a walk in the Park, that is, if the 



70 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

porter would allow her to pass at this hour. She 
would see the famous yew grove she had read of, 
dark at noonday, and positively sepulchral at night, 
where the White Lady of Mortham walked and 
bewailed her unnamed woes. She would listen to 
the mysterious "hum" beetles, which served for 
"tuck of drum" to marshal the gallant outlaws of 
the ballad : 

"Oh, Brignal Banks are fresh and fair, 

And Greta woods are green ; 
I'd rather rove with Edmund there 
Than reign our English Queen!" 

"How strange his name should be Edmund, too!" 

So musing, she went out. She did not trouble to 
put on a hat, and she took off her tiresome spectacles 
and put them in her pocket, for it had grown so dark 
that, even if anyone were to meet her going out of the 
inn door, he would not be able to see her face with 
any degree of clearness. 

But when she got into the hall, she changed her 
mind capriciously and went into the garden instead 
of the Park. 

As she passed the window of his room, she noticed 
that the white linen blind was not drawn down, and 
the lighted lamp inside showed the table with its 
queer, old-fashioned, rose-embroidered cloth, all 
littered with the paraphernalia of an artist's work, 
and the artist himself intently bending over a sepia 
sketch lying in front of him. 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 71 

He had evidently forgotten her very existence ! 

No wonder! A plain woman with smoked spec- 
tacles and a bald forehead. So she characterized her- 
self. That was all she had allowed him to see of her. 
She stood there for a very long time, watching him, 
her hand raised to her face ready to veil it in case he 
should look up. She had no scruples, for if he had 
objected to being looked at, he would have pulled down 
the blind. 

Every now and then, a ripe pear, ruined by the in- 
sidious wasp that preyed on it secretly, fell heavily 
down on the sodden earth under the window, and 
startled her, but he never raised his head. She ceased 
to expect him to do so, and stood at ease, listening to 
the various puzzling night sounds and quite uncon- 
scious of the flight of time. Queer noises came from 
the great, mysterious demesne on the other side of 
the house that excess of rank foliage in which it 
seemed that every known variety of animal might 
find a home; it was so "whick," in local parlance, so 
full of all the forms of sylvan life, crawling, creeping, 
rustling in among the long grasses and twisted boughs 
all through the summer night. Presently, the short, 
sharp bark of a fox, that came from the covert, did 
penetrate to his ears through the thickness of the 
pane; he looked up, seemed to stare at her, and she 
fled. 



CHAPTER IV 

A maid deposited a can of hot water, and knocked 
at Mrs. Elles' door next morning, as the latter had 
desired her to do over night. Thinking, perhaps, of 
her faithful Jane, she sleepily called out "Come in!" 
from force of habit. 

The servant stared at the new inmate of the 
"Heather Bell," unrestrainedly, as she lay there, in 
bed, her pretty hair ruffled over her forehead, and the 
disfiguring spectacles lying on the dressing-table 
beside her. Mrs. Elles did not know what hour it 
was ; she had left her watch behind her in Newcastle, 
but she was sure she had been lying awake for hours 
and hours, listening to the bewildering chorus of 
birds from the pear tree all round her window, and 
the rub-a-dub of the churning in the yard below. 

"Nine o'clock, you say? Why did you not call me 
earlier? Has Mr. Rivers gone out sketching already?' ' 
was her first thoughtless question. 

"Yes, ma'am!" 

"Does he go every day?" Mrs. Elles further en- 
quired, forgetting, too, to correct the title. 

"Every day, unless it rains." 

"And what does he do then?" 

"Bides at home and pents." 
73 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 73 

Mrs. Elles was recalled to a sense of the impropriety 
of all these questions on her part, and she dismissed 
the girl haughtily. She dressed, put back her hair, 
and resumed her spectacles with a sigh, but without 
hesitation. She had no full length mirror here to 
show her the oddish, but not ungraceful appearance 
that she presented, for, although her facial beauties 
were temporarily obscured, her slight figure in its 
boyish trim had a certain attractiveness of its own. 
The average glance would cursorily set her down for 
a well-grown school girl, labouring under a temporary 
affection of the eyes, which was, however, not serious 
enough to interfere with her health and spirits. 

After she had breakfasted, in pursuance of a plan 
that she had conceived, she got one of the landlady's 
sons to drive her over to Barnard Castle, where she 
purchased an outfit of drawing materials and a cheap 
Student's Manual of Art. In the afternoon Mr. 
Rivers, she ascertained, never came back to the inn 
for luncheon, but took out some sandwiches, which 
he ate, if he remembered to do so she selected a 
point of view, just by the bridge over the Greta, a 
stone's throw from the inn. She there began a study 
of the Student's Manual, and her own capabilities in 
the way of handling a pencil. 

She had had no previous training, but she was just 
clever enough to produce a not utterly despicable 
result, and that was all she had dared to hope. She 
did not expect to see the artist that day, nor did she ; 
but she was not bored, although she had no one to 



74 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

speak to, and, to a woman of her temperament, that 
fact alone would, in the ordinary course of things, 
have engendered complete despair. But then, things 
were not by any means in then* ordinary course ; the 
very air was full of adventure and excitement of the 
vaguest and most blameless nature. Mrs. Elles had 
no precise idea of what it was that she hoped and 
desired, and with the unconscious diplomacy of the 
dual mind, took very good care not even to formu- 
late it. 

But next day, as she sat on her camp stool, with a 
half finished sketch of the picturesque stone bridge 
across her knee, she felt, rather than heard, Mr. 
Rivers coming down the road behind her. Hastily 
she pushed her spectacles back into position over her 
eyes, and turned a very little in his direction. 

"Good morning," he said, pleasantly enough. 

"Good morning," she said, half rising. "I 
have been wanting to thank you so much all these 
days." 

"For what?" 

"For recommending this delightful inn to me, of 
course." 

The spectacles interfered somewhat with the arch 
play of her eyebrows as she said this, very demurely. 

He looked, if possible, a little abashed. 

"Well, I can hardly say that I recommended it. 
In fact, I rather tried to warn you off it. I thought 
it would be too rough for a lady. I am glad you find 
it pretty comfortable." 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 75 

"I only wanted quiet, like you," she said. "I have 
been very much overwrought, lately, and this is the 
very thing for me. You see, I am trying to occupy 
myself a little!" she pointed to her sketch. 

"But you have not got the best point of view not 
by any means," he exclaimed. "I am not venturing 
to look at your drawing, of course, but I know " 

"Oh, please!" she said, holding up the sketch. 
"If only you would, I should be so grateful." 

He looked at her drawing carefully and critically. 

"You really have not at all a bad idea ; but I should 
sacrifice that sketch if I were you you have not got 
very far on with it, and the abutment of the bridge 
comes so badly in it and begin a new one, here, 
further down . . . I will show you." 

Without any exhibition of the amateur's stubborn- 
ness, she rose cheerfully, and allowed him to move 
her camp-stool for her to a place where the abutment 
presented a more graceful aspect. Little did she care 
for abutments, but she was delighted that he should 
take an interest in her work. He stood looking at 
the view he had chosen for her with professionally 
half -closed eyes. 

"It comes better from here, don't you think!" he 
said. 

"Oh, I don't think I know nothing about it!" 
she cried. "I am only a beginner, and have never 
had any instruction at all!" 

"Yes, I can see that," he replied drily, "but let 
me tell you, you haven't at all a bad notion of per- 



76 



spective! Plenty of people learn perspective pain- 
fully and never get as near it as that. I have always 
held that perspective came by nature I never learned 
it, at any rate!" 

He looked down at her then with considerable 
benignity, as supporting a beloved theory, adding, 
however, sharply, "I cannot understand how you 
manage to see through those. "Well, persevere! You 
will find it come very nicely like that And now, I 
must be off !" 

"Are you going to that place where I saw you the 
other day?" she enquired, with eager simplicity. 
Since he spoke to her as if he considered her a school- 
girl, she would use the privileges appertaining to that 
inchoate and irresponsible age towards him. At the 
same time she shot a glance not precisely of the 
schoolgirl in his direction, that was only rendered 
void and vain by the smoky barrier interposed between 
it and its object. In another minute she would have 
summoned up courage to ask him if she might go to 
Brignal with him, but he nonplussed her by raising 
his cap, in token of farewell, and making a quick, 
decisive movement across the bridge, as if he had not 
heard her question. 

She sat down resignedly in the new place he had 
chosen for her, and made a few ineffectual strokes 
with her pencil. To herself she muttered, "I wonder 
how old? a forward sixteen? or a stunted eighteen, 
perhaps?" words which had obviously no reference to 
her drawing. She knitted her brows with all the 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 77 

petty rage of the amateur ; she aggressively sharpened 
her pencil and broke it, five times over; and at last, 
in a fit of temper consistent with the extreme juve- 
nility of Rivers' presumed conception of her, tosssd 
both the sketches into the Greta and watched them 
float easily away on the changing ripples. 

"They will go down to where he is," she thought, 
full of a sense of the continuity of this stream flowing 
down that long dark glen leading to the light, where 
the master sat in his earthly paradise and recked not 
of his hopeless and despairing pupil. 

"And why should he?" was her next reflection. 
"What a fool I am! But, indeed, a man like that is 
wasted on Nature, and Nature is evidently the only 
thing in the world that he cares for!" 

Signs of unusual activity, and the smell of piping 
hot pie-crust greeted her when she went rather 
drearily back to the inn for her luncheon. 

The bare, barn-like room was swept and garnished 
unusually. Great bunches of pink phlox, tied up 
with blue ribbons, were nailed into the corners and 
clashed with the lavender-coloured plaster; festoons 
of miscellaneous verdure were disposed across and all 
round the severe texts on the walls, and the terrors 
of "Prepare to meet thy God!" were veiled in purple 
fuchias and yellow marigolds. Her humble little 
lunch of cold British beef was laid for her, as usual, 
on a corner of the tressel table. The landlady of the 
"Heather Bell" came up to her as she was eating it, 
and her buxom arms were floured to the elbow, where 



78 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

a couple of currants were sticking in token of her 
recent occupation. 

"We 're that busy," she began, breathlessly. "We've 
got a cheap trip comin' fra' Barney Cassel this after- 
noon near a hundred of 'em. I've baked thirty pies 
this very morning, and I was a-goin' to ask ye, Miss, 
if ye would mind get tin' yer dinner along o' the 
gentleman, for we shall na have seen the last on 'em 
till fair on to neet, and a tarrible mess they'se leave 
behind, I'se warrant 'em!" 

Mrs. Elles' heart leaped, but she controlled her 
emotions and recalled the busy landlady, who had 
turned away as if the point was settled. 

'Stop, Mrs. Watson I am not sure that Mr. 
Rivers will like that!" 

"Hout, lassie, then he'll just hae to put up wi' it! 
Leave him alone; I'll settle it wi' him." 

"No, no!" dubiously. 

"But I tell ye, ye must ! We canna let ye have the 

*t * */ <J 

room to-day, and that's flat!" repeated Mrs. Watson, 
sturdily, but without acrimony. 

"Then I won't dine at all!" Mrs. Elles said, 
vehemently, but without decision. 

She took up her hat, however, and walked slowly 
down the road to the Park Gates, rang the porter's 
bell, and was admitted. She went along the Broad 
Walk and through the yew grove, till she came to the 
right bank of the Greta, which flows through the Park 
of Rokeby on its way to join the Tees, just outside 
its limits. 



THE HUMAN INTEEEST 79 

She sat there for the whole of the afternoon, 
watching the owner of the Park and the Hall, whose 
smoke she could just see curling through the trees, 
as he waded about in his own river, in his loose india- 
rubber leggings, and caught his own trout in calm 
and contentment. 

She was surprised to find how little bored she was. 
She did not intend to be. She made a point of being 
amused by the varied aspects of nature free untram- 
melled exuberant nature that were being presented 
to her. It was the very quintessence of wild life that 
surrounded her now. The ceaseless ripple of the 
river was relieved by the frequent splash and flicker 
of the enormous trout that tenanted it, as they rose 
flippantly to the surface or were dragged there by the 
imperious rod. Queer cries, that came out of the 
brake behind her, betokened the sad little dramas of 
animal life that were going on behind the leafy screen. 
The squeak of the rabbit at its last stand before the 
murderous weasel ; the scuffle of the little birds upon 
whom the sparrow-hawk dashed, leaving those sad 
heaps of grey, white-rooted feathers to tell the tale of 
rapine, came to her ears, as did the more peaceful 
coo of the wood-pigeons from the coverts of thorn and 
hazel on the other and steeper side of the river. 
"Milk the coo, Katie!" such was Mrs. Watson's 
homely interpretation of their cry, and she found 
herself repeating it over and over again to herself. 

Everything pleased her and responded to the mood 
she was in. There was a "distant dearness" in the 



80 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

hilla that bowered in this happy valley, "a secret 
sweetness in the stream" that flowed to a place two 
miles off, where, indeed, she would fain have been, 
but that would come in time. She was full of a 
great peace. She thought she could almost feel the 
wrinkles of ennui and harassment slowly fading out 
of her forehead, and the tangle of rebellious nerves 
that had driven her away from her home smoothing 
themselves out, as she sat there, and, like Words- 
worth's Lucy, allowed "beauty born of murmuring 
sound to pass into her face." True to herself, she 
immediately forced a personal application, and 
reduced Nature into subserviency to the Human 
Interest. With a well pointed tag of verse she pointed 
and emphasized the sensations of Phoebe Elles now 
become the motive and main pivot of the most beauti- 
ful landscape in the world. 

For the moment with her the health motive reigned 
supreme. She was no longer a runaway wife, she was 
an invalid profiting by change of air. Nothing was 
going to happen ; let the world stand still while she 
was happy for the first time in her life. Surely she 
had a right to a little happiness ! 

She stayed there until the one red-trunked fir tree, 
up there on the heights by Mortham Peel, caught 
and glowed in the sunset light, and the damp mists 
began to rise in their proportion from this enormous 
area of rank foliage that engendered them. The 
fisherman put up his rod and went home. The 
doves cooed in a continuous monotone. Mrs. Elles 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 81 

knew well enough by all these signs that it was get- 
ting late. As she loitered slowly home, she could 
hear on the other side of the high Park wall the 
noisy passage of char-a-bancs, and vans full of jovial 
people, whose hoarsely shouted refrain of "She's a 
jolly good fellow!" testified to their appreciation of 
Mrs. Watson's thirty pies and cheerful welcome. 
Peace was evidently restored, and Mr. Eivers would 
have had his dinner quietly and be done by the time 
she got back. She was not at all hungry ; she would 
have a glass of milk and a sandwich in her room. 
She was a woman who habitually took strong coffee 
twice a day. 

"How changed I am!" she thought. 

The party of trippers had gone, silence reigned, 
but the open door of the meeting room, as she crossed 
the hall on her way in, showed a wild and hideous 
scene of tea-stained table-cloths and broken meats. 

"An awful sight, isn't it?" asked Mr. Rivers, who 
was standing a dark shape filling up the space, at 
the door of his own room. Then he hesitated a 
little. ... 

"Mrs. Watson tells me that I am to have the 
pleasure of your company to-night?" 

His tone was absolutely courteous, but she failed to 
detect any very strong cordiality in it, as was of 
course natural. 

"He thinks me an awful bore!" she thought, but 
what she said was "I thought you would have dined 
by this time." 



82 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

"Of course I have not," he replied, raising his eye- 
brows, "but I believe dinner is just ready." 

He held the door of the sitting-room wide open for 
her with just the right gesture and the right attitude 
of courtly invitation. 

"I must go and take off my hat," she said, quite 
humbly, and ran upstairs. 

Indeed, she had given fate every chance of depriv- 
ing her of this pleasure. Fate was against her 
or for her ! She conscientiously rubbed her hair flat 
with a wet brush, disposed her spectacles squarely 
over her eyes and walked' demurely downstairs to join 
Mr. Eivers. 

"Yes, it is fate!" she said to herself again, as she 
sat down opposite him. The slatternly maid removed 
the dull pewter cover from three sad and starved look- 
ing chops and the shapeless ghosts of three potatoes, 
and then shuffled out of the room like an escaped 
convict. It was not luxury, but it was Paradise. 

Still, in order to lead up to a question she wished 
to ask him about the black-browed girl who had 
waited on her a day or two before, Mrs. Elles 
remarked, carelessly, "I don't think much of the 
service at this inn; do you?" 

He shrugged his shoulders. "I think I warned you 
not to expect much, did I not? But it is clean, at 
any rate, and that's all I care for." 

"Oh, yes, it is quite charming. But still that 
clumsy servant must be rather a trial to you?" 

"I am not fidgety," he said. "And I have taught 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 83 

her not to touch my painting things. That is the 
main point, for me. I had to be very strict about 
that, for she completely ruined a drawing of mine, 
once." 

"How?" asked Mrs. Elles, interested. 

"Oh, with the enquiring thumb of her class. It 
lighted on the sky, unfortunately. She was dread- 
fully sorry about it, and actually brought me five 
shillings and asked me if that would cover the 
damage? You know it takes an expert to handle a 
drawing as the painter of it would like to see it 
handled. I am quite beside myself sometimes, when 
I have to stand by and see intending purchasers take 
hold of them, and run their thumbs into the corners, 
and make creases in the paper! But one can say 
nothing, of course." 

She looked at the artist's own hands, and noticed 
the way he took hold of things. His long, thin, 
eminently prehensile fingers had a way of deliber- 
ately grasping an object in exactly the place where 
the eye had previously decreed that it should be 
grasped, without false shots or clumsy bungling of 
any kind. It was a hand skilled in all mechanical 
exercises, and apt at all delicate manoeuvres. It was 
firm and strong, too the hand of an artist and a 
craftsman. 

He did not seem to notice that she was looking at 
his hands and neglecting to carry on the conversa- 
tion ; he had a trick of becoming absorbed in his own 
thoughts at a moment's notice, so she had observed; 



84 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

but he could be recalled just as easily and quickly. 
She went on presently 

"That other girl's hands wouldn't make a mark, 
would they? She seems rather superior." 

"Who? The landlady's niece. Oh, she has been 
at school in London, and is quite a personage 
plays this piano in the winter, and reads 'George 
Eliot.'" 

"I don't like her," said Mrs. Elles, "and she 
doesn't like me." 

"Nonsense!" he said, as if he were speaking to a 
child; "Jane Ann is a very good girl indeed." 

"Her head is too big for her body," Mrs. Elles 
added, irrelevantly; "and I can't bear people who 
are what is called above then* station. A little edu- 
cation is a dangerous thing, I think, if it makes 
people priggish and stunts their growth. I notice 
she never looks one straight in the face." 

"Why should she?" said the painter, unexpectedly, 
and that rather put an end to the conversation. 

"I think of going and taking a little walk in the 
Park, if I can, after dinner," Mrs. Elles presently 
remarked, wishing to show that she did not intend to 
be a nuisance. "I have spent the whole afternoon 
there, already, and I think it must be most mysterious 
and wonderful at night." 

"Are you not afraid to meet the ghost?" 

"I should perfectly love to meet it!" cried she, 
clasping her hands together. 

"Then, of course, you won't. 'The White Lady 



85 



of Mortham' I believe here she is called by the less 
poetical name of the 'Dobie!' won't show unless she 
is to produce her effect and frighten you," 

"I might frighten her," said Mrs. Elles, still harp- 
ing on her own grotesque personal metamorphosis, 
which was ever present to her mind. 

But he did not take her up and she went on 

"The Park reminds me of the Forest in Undine. 
Do you remember Kiiheleborn and the mysterious 
faces that used to come out of the Forest and peer in 
at the window of the fisherman's cottage?" 

She glanced as she said this at the window of the 
room they were sitting in, the blind of which was not 
drawn down, as usual. She could only suppose that 
it was a fad of his, and that he had given the maid 
orders to leave it so. She had not been in his com- 
pany a couple of hours without realizing that he was 
full of fads. 

'The black night comes straight against the 
pane," she went on dreamily. "All the ghosts in 
the forest may come and look in on us if they choose ! 
I rather like it, I have a weakness for ghosts. I feel 
as if the White Lady of Mortham I prefer to call 
her the spirit of the Greta might be looking in on 
us now!" 

She gave a little shudder, part real, part affected. 

"I did see a woman's face at the window not now, 
but last night!" mused the painter with a touch of 
unexpected seriousness that finished the subjugation 
of his sentimental listener. "I saw it quite clearly, 



86 THE HUMAN INTEKEST 

as I see you now. It was wild and distraught look- 
ing, as a spirit's face should be " 

"Oh, you believe in ghosts, then? I am so glad." 

"A landscape painter must personify Nature a 
little, don't you think? He should raise altars to 
propitiate the divinities of rivers and groves, so 
important for him. The Greta especially has a very 
wicked tutelary spirit, who needs keeping in a good 
humour, only I have not time." 

"What do you mean?" 

"It has its bore, like the Severn, or the Seine its 
Mascaret, and comes down occasionally without the 
slightest warning, like a brown wall, and sweeps 
everything, including landscape painters, before it." 

"You have seen it?" 

"No, I have only heard of it, as yet. And I hope, 
when it comes, it will not take me unawares sitting 
in the bed of the river as I so often do ! I should 
have to run or rather leap for it!" 

"It is a danger!" she said, quite seriously. 

"Oh, one of the very few that beset the artistic field 
of battle," he said, laughing; "there are not many. 
It teaches us painters to 'look alive' and cultivate 
some of the qualities of a sailor. I do have to get 
into such funny places to paint from sometimes 
places where I literally must hang on by my eyelids ! 
. . . Now shall I ring for Dorothy to bring in some 
other luxuries?" 

Dorothy, summoned by a handbell, shambled in, 
bringing a bleached and tremulous cornflour pudding 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 87 

and three doddering baked apples, and set them down 
solemnly before Mr. Rivers and Mrs. Elles. The 
infatuated woman did not mind 

"A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou 
Beside me, singing in the Wilderness, 
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!" 

But when the maid had cleared the table, in her 
own primitive, knock-me-down fashion, and replaced 
the white cloth by the hideous tapestry one, covered 
with its pattern of pink roses, faded and dulled, more- 
over, by the constant splashing of the painter's brush 
in the tumbler full of water which she, as regularly 
as clockwork, placed on the middle 'patch of flowers 
every evening, Mrs. Elles was suddenly overcome 
by an unusual sense of shyness. This man made her 
shy as no man before had ever done. He was so polite 
and yet so distant. His want of self-consciousness 
seemed a reproof to her imperious and pampered 
personality. 

To cover it, she rose and shyly looked round the 
room that the artist had occupied year after year, and 
on which he had presumably impressed himself, his 
tastes, his prevailing habit of mind. 

That habit, to judge by its chosen surroundings, 
was a very ascetic one ; as different from her own as 
possibly could be imagined. This was a workroom 
pure and simple. Not an attempt had been made, it 
would seem, to redeem its humble, commonplace 
ugliness. Abraham, in coloured worsteds, com- 



88 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

placently sacrificed Isaac, over the mantelpiece; Mrs. 
Elles would have covered the pair with an art rug of 
some sort. The frosted-sugar top of Mrs. Watson's 
wedding cake stood on the console; Mrs. Elles 
would, regardless of offence to the poor old lady, 
have requested her to remove it. Every other avail- 
able table and cornice was heaped and piled with 
sketch books; easels and bulging umbrellas filled up 
all the four corners. There was a little stack of 
books on the mantelshelf, but not a single work of 
fiction was to be discerned among them. There was 
Shelley just the watery, bloodless, spiritually intense 
poet that she would expect Rivers to appreciate. 
There were some flowers in a little china dog on the 
side table, garden flowers, phloxes and stocks, but 
these Mrs. Elles rightly attributed to the solicitude 
of the landlady's niece. The whole room was 
intensely significant to her of those qualities, which, 
with her trick of hasty generalization, she now chose 
to attribute to this man, modesty, endurance, and 
self-abnegation, and a whole-souled devotion to his 
art and the purposes of his art. 

There was the old-fashioned, silk-fluted piano on 
one side of the room, to which he had alluded, and 
she paused, with her hand on the curved lid. 

"Oh, that has stood there ever since I first came 
here," the artist said; "I have never dared to open 
it. Jane Anne plays on it in the winter, I believe. 
This house, from its neighbourhood to the park, is so 
damp that I am sure that no piano could endure it 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 89 

and live. That is the worst of all embowering trees ! 
Have you noticed that one's notepaper becomes like 
blotting paper?" 

How should she notice, who had no notepaper of 
her own, and wrote no letters? She opened the 
instrument and played a bar or two. 

"Quite tolerable!" she pronounced. 

He quietly put a chair in front of it, without say- 
ing anything, and she sat down and played a bit of 
her favourite Chopin. 

He thanked her, not very warmly. 

"Don't you like Chopin?" 

"He does me no good. Too restless! What is 
the use of setting all one's nerves in an uproar, as he 
does, and giving one no solution? I confess that I 
like music that resolves me. Beethoven, for in- 
stance." 

"Oh, Beethoven resolves you, does he?" She 
hardly knew what Rivers meant, but she knew that 
she did not care for Beethoven. "What a pity I don't 
know any of him! Is he " she hesitated; she was 
becoming shy of airing her tentative little theories to 
this man whose culture, as she apprehended, had its 
roots in tradition, in a knowledge far deeper than she 
could claim for her own, mere "self-made" woman 
that she was "is he the landscape painter's musi- 
cian, as Shelley is his poet?" 

"I should say that Wordsworth was that, more 
properly." 

"I hate Wordsworth!" she answered, with vigour 



90 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

and truth, "and as for Shelley, I should call him the 
poet of physical geography!" 

He laughed. "You don't care for atmospheric 
effects in poetry, I see. You prefer Keats." 

"Yes, I do. And as for putting on his tombstone 
that his name was to be writ in water, I think that 
would have suited Shelley far better. Keats' name 
should have been written in blood he was passionate. 
. . . Shall I try to sing something to you." Her 
singing was nothing wonderful, but sweet and sym- 
pathetic and never out of tune. All her gifts wero 
natural, she had always been too restless to apply 
herself to any but that of pose, which she had 
brought to so high a pitch of perfection. 

But the songs which she sang were the kind of songs 
that Rivers seemed to like, for his brown eyes grow 
soft and limpid and his face looked less set and more 
open as he listened. 

For this parity in their likings she had to thank 
her husband, who, in the days when she had cared to 
please him, had insisted on her cultivating an 
acquaintance with the simple national airs of all 
countries that he could join in. She felt, somehow, 
that a little French repertory she had would not be 
appropriate just now and refrained from producing it. 

She sang on until the sound of shutters closing and 
the tramp of heavy-booted men the landlady's two 
stalwart sons trooping up to their beds in the attics, 
warned them of the lateness of the hour according to 
country canons. 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 91 

"If yon do care at all for my songs," she asked, 
deprecatingly, as he lit her candle for her at the foot 
of the stairs, "may I come and play for you again 
another evening?" 

Her glance both their glances, as she spoke, were 
irresistibly directed to that scene of havoc and dis- 
aster, the meeting-room, whose open door confronted 
them. It was swept and cleared now of the litter of 
the tea, and freshly sanded, but still as dreary and 
comfortless an abiding place as could well be 
imagined. 

"You had better use my sitting-room in future 
that is, if you will. That barrack of a room is not fit 
for anyone to inhabit. But you will not mind my 
working as usual, and then, I am afraid I get so 
absorbed that I cannot talk, or even be ordinarily 
civil!" 

"Oh, may I really?" she cried. "I assure you I 
shall be quite happy sitting beside you," she was 
going to say, but corrected it into "with my book!" 
Though where the literature was to come from that 
was to keep her quiet was more than she knew. 
Excepting the Shelley, Taine's "Historic de PEsthet- 
ique Anglaise" was quite the lightest work on 
Rivers' mantelpiece, and she had had, of course, no 
books among her luggage. 

"Very well, then, we will look upon that as set- 
tled," he said, shortly, and held out his hand again 
to say good- night. 

"I will come in in the evenings, if you will let me, 



92 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

when it really is melancholy in that big meeting- 
room, but during the day " 

"During the day I am generally out, so you will 
be able to have the room entirely to yourself," he 
rejoined, in his own disconcerting manner, and the 
candle he was holding seemed to her to light up a 
little flicker of something like amusement in his eyes. 

"Yes, I know," she said, desperately, "at that 
place in the woods where I first met you. Has the 
foxglove grown again? I wanted to ask you. I shall 
come and see for myself some day." 

She spoke with an assumed archness, with all the 
while a fearful stricture about the heart, lest she was 
alienating him by her boldness as of the schoolgirl 
she believed him to believe her to be. Her candle- 
stick, which she had now taken from his hand, 
trembled in her own. 

"Do!" he replied, civilly, in a tone absolutely 
devoid of all enthusiasm. Jane Anne crossed the 
hall as they loosed their hands. "And now, good- 
night!" 

Mrs. Elles waited a whole day before she profited 
by the artist's invitation to visit him at the place 
where he worked. She was rewarded for her discre- 
tion, for, at dinner that very evening, he asked her 
coolly why she had not been? So, the day after,' she 
walked over to Brignal and stayed full fifteen min- 
utes at his side. She managed to be so little of a 
nuisance that, next day, she was emboldened to take 
over her drawing materials at the artist 's own sugges- 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 93 

tion, and began a series of minute and painstaking 
sketches of the vegetation of the immediate fore- 
ground, to be used by him afterwards as memoranda. 
He had admitted that it would be useful to him. 

Then it became a settled thing that she should walk 
over every day after twelve o'clock, and take him his 
letters and the papers which were left at the "Heather 
Bell" by the postman from Barnard Castle quite an 
hour after his departure. Thus the compromising 
fact of her own total dearth of correspondence 
escaped his attention, if, indeed, he should take cog- 
nizance of such a detail. 

She marvelled at his extraordinary power of detach- 
ment. Did matters merely mundane ever impress 
him? Did anything, humanly speaking, ever put 
him out, except in so far as it interfered with his 
work? Was he literally, as he used to say himself, 
only a registering machine of effects and views, 
pledged to render an actual transcript of Nature, 
seen, as is the condition of all art, through a tem- 
perament, but a temperament merely receptive, 
limpid, clear, and untroubled by the waves of passion- 
ate human yearnings and desires? There was actually 
something of what Browning calls the "terrible com- 
posure" of Nature about him, she thought, a patient, 
broad-minded, magnificent way of regarding things 
entailed by a continual contemplation of her vast- 
ness, her implacabilities, her unconscious cruelties 
and brutalities. She never could forget Eivers' 
behaviour in a thunderstorm that overtook them one 



94 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

Sunday afternoon by Scargill Tower. Out came the 
sketch book, quick as the lightning that seemed to 
flicker in its horribly malicious way down by the 
stone wall that edged the road they wore walking 
along. 

"I must have that!" he murmured. V By Jove!" 
He actually stopped, and stood still on the white 
road among the falling thunderbolts, as it seemed to 
her. She stopped too and opened her puny umbrella, 
trying to ward off some of the heavy rain-drops from 
the leaves of the sketch book. It never even seemed 
to occur to the artist that she might be afraid, or wet. 
She was not afraid, such was the contagion of his 
courage, but she was wet through. The rain splashed 
on his paper in spite of her efforts, and blended 
together colours that the artist hastily cast on, into 
shapes unexpected by him, but still a memorandum 
of the breathing light and steam of mist over there 
by Cotherstone, where the storm that oppressed them 
now was passing off, had been secured. It was quite 
worth her while ; she had the satisfaction of knowing 
that Rivers could not think her a coward. He did 
not tell her so, but took her pluck and superiority to 
feminine weakness as a matter of course. 

She was driven to try and please him by the 
achievement of new virtues, entirely foreign to her 
nature. She laughed, sometimes, when she thought 
of herself, the leader of what there was of advanced 
literary thought in Newcastle the lady who could 
discuss the higher ethics, and expound the morbid- 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 95 

ities of Amiel and Meredith to a select cultured circle, 
being forced to recommend herself to the man she 
loved by a display of mere physical courage, and even 
manual dexterity. Yes, she found she could really 
please Eivers best by attending to his bridge for him. 

This was a rough arrangement of stepping stones, 
which the painter had made for himself before he 
came there, by manipulating the loose boulders of 
the river bed a little. It constituted a short cut from 
the inn to his sketching place, and saved him a 
mile's walk at least. He had taken good care to give 
the stream play between the rough piers of his bridge 
as it were, leaving enormous gaps and chasms, but 
still the river resented being interfered with, and 
altered the position of the stones and washed them 
away sometimes in the night, of malice prepense, as 
Mrs. Elles declared. She found plenty to do every 
day in replacing the stones that had been dislodged 
and adding new ones, and worked away merrily, 
thinking of Cincinnatus and his plough, and of the 
picture Dante began to paint for Beatrice, in this 
connection. 

"The very first time the river comes down," Eivers 
prophesied, "all our work will have to be done over 
again. There will be no bridge left!" 

She could, of course, have shown herself a great 
deal more agile without her spectacles, which ham- 
pered her continually, but she had made a point of 
never removing them in sight of her fellow creatures, 
and only ventured to push them up over her brows 



96 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

when she was alone with only cows and squirrels for 
witnesses. She clung to them, as a saint might hug 
his cross or an anchorite his hair-shirt. They sym- 
bolized the purity of her intentions, they were her 
armour of honourable woman and loyal wife to Morti- 
mer ; her ticket-of -leave indeed, when she thought of 
him and all that he implied. She put the odious and 
tiresome things on every morning, as a knight endures 
his panoply or buckles on his shield of proof, and 
honourably continued to wander about in a cold, blue, 
local atmosphere of her own, aware only through her 
other senses of the glow of yellow light and hope that 
lay outside, besieging the frigid unreceptive discs of 
her self-imposed barrier in vain. 

'It is hateful, but it just saves the situation," she 
would say to herself. "And it makes me free. I 
can say what I like and do what I like, so long as I 
don't look what I like!" But, indeed, there were 
times when that last item of forbearance seemed the 
hardest item of all. 

Yes, the odd and distressing thing was that, in con- 
sequence of her wearing them, she had never really 
seen Rivers' face, and, worse than that even, he had 
never seen hers. He betrayed no curiosity, no desire 
at all to see it, and his indifference affronted her 
vanity not a little. There must be something left out 
of a man, she argued, who could take pleasure in the 
society of such an example of unsexed, negative 
womanhood as she presented. For she was sure that 
he did take pleasure in her society, now, in an odd, 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 97 

misogynistical way that he was glad when he saw 
her come stumbling and tottering across the bridge of 
slippery stones to him of a morning, sometimes even 
staying herself by one hand on the moist slabs of 
moss-grown rock that lay in her passage, the other 
holding high and dry her budget of letters and news. 
His voice, as he bade her good morning, sometimes 
even without looking up he was so occupied testi- 
fied to a certain pleasurable anticipation of her com- 
pany, or at least she thought so. 

'Oh, only your bridge-maker!" she used to say to 
him as she came up, frankly accepting the position. 
"I have put three new stones in to-day." 

"He doesn't treat me as if I were a woman at all!" 
she said to herself bitterly, "and I believe I am less 
of a woman than I was. I am more manly; I think 
less of my looks and more of my muscles. I never 
even knew I had any, till I came here!" She sighed. 
"Yes, I see I must cultivate this aspect of me, and 
keep the eternal feminine relentlessly down. It 
would frighten him, or at any rate disturb him. 
Would it? Ah, I dare not try. I must stay as I am, 
absolutely non-committal!" 

She sighed again. 



CHAPTER V 

Mrs. Elles had arrived at Rokeby on a Monday. 
When Sunday came round, she had been prepared for 
the usual flying in the face of Philistine custom and 
observance that prevailed in her own circle and 
imagined that the artist would go out to paint as 
usual or perhaps as a concession to popular prejudice 
stay and work indoors. But to her intense surprise 
and amusement, eleven o'clock on Sunday morning 
found her murmuring the Litany by the side of the 
artist in the parish church, among the placid farmers 
and their complacent, Sunday-bedizened wives. Mr. 
Rivers, it seemed, was in the habit of going to church 
every Sunday, and, when she discovered this, it had 
seemed quite natural to go with him, though it was 
the first time she had been inside the walls of a 
church since her marriage. The service, to her mind 
unblunted by custom, seemed very picturesque; so 
was the church, a beautiful specimen of pure early 
Gothic, and the figure of this grave, handsome man, 
standing by her side, with his dark head relieved 
against the white plaster background, most natural of 
all. 

"If anyone had told me, a month ago," she 
98 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 99 

thought, "that I should be doing this, I believe I 
should have laughed in his face." 

She felt happy, but a little out of place, and looked 
it, perhaps, for the vicar, a stolid, white-bearded, 
dignified man, stared at her over the pulpit cushion, 
discreetly, while a thin, little, sharp-nosed lady, pre- 
sumably of some authority in the congregation, did 
so, too, indiscreetly. Jane Anne, who played the har- 
monium, was discretion itself and never even glanced 
her way, but Mrs. Elles thought she read excommu- 
nication and condemnation in every turn of her not 
too supple wrist. 

"So you go to church every Sunday?" Mrs. Elles 
said to Kivers, as they walked down the path and 
away together. "Somehow I thought artists " 

"Never went to church?" He finished her sen- 
tence for her. "Well, I don't know. I don't do it 
as a religious observance, exactly, I am afraid. I do 
it because I like it, here in the country. Besides," 
he added, "it is a beautiful church!" 

Mrs. Elles, who considered herself an agnostic, was 
satisfied, by this speech, that Rivers' church-going 
was the result of his indulgence of aesthetic needs 
rather than spiritual ones; though, indeed, she 
would have been quite ready to embrace any faith to 
which he should pronounce his adhesion. 

"How picturesque the Vicar's white hair is!" she 
remarked, aloud. "Do you know him?" 

"Oh, yes; Mr. Popham. He will come now to call 
on you, since you have been to call on him." 



100 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

"Good heavens! Does he go to see you?" she 
cried, with what would appear to be uncalled-for 
emphasis. 

"Yes; he comes now and again, but I am always 
out. We generally meet somewhere about the place, 
and then we get on very well. He had a tiresome 
habit of coming and looking over my shoulder at 
Brignal, but I have trained him not to stay very long. " 

"Is he married?" she enquired, eagerly. 

"Yes; that was his wife in the pew to the right." 

"Does she come and look over your shoulder, 
too?" 

"She takes a tender interest in my work," Rivers 
said, laughing. "She is by way of being an artist 
herself, you see." 

"That little, starved, angular, high-cheek-boned 
woman, without a touch of artistic feeling about her, 
and bonnet strings of the wrong colour ! ' ' 

"You must not go by bonnet strings entirely. 
They are a matter of convention. Mrs. Popham has 
a very good eye for colour, let me tell you, only she is 
dreadfully shy of publicity, and would think it quite 
improper to exhibit. One never knows into what 
vessels the spirit will be poured. I go in in the 
evening sometimes and look over her sketches ; she is 
very good to me. She walked all the way to Brignal 
once, with a cork mat for me to put my feet on!" 

"And did you use it? I never see you!" 

"It bores me that sort of thing bores me. You 
will find it in my sketching bag, though." 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 101 

"What is the good of carrying it there and back 
every day, if you don't use it?" 

"Ah, but in case she were to come, I would hastily 
adjust it under my feet, so as not to hurt her feelings. 
But she is not likely to walk so far." 

"I suppose she is perfectly devoted to you, like 
everybody else?" 

He did not take any notice of her remark. 

"So is Jane Anne!" she next observed. 

"Jane Anne is a very clever girl," replied Eivers, 
too single-minded and too busy to see the construction 
that might be put on the turn of his phrase. 

"She may be a mute inglorious Milton!" remarked 
Mrs. Elles, "but I am sure she is not a nice nature. 
She looks a potential murderess with those lowering 
brows. As for Mrs. Popham, I don't know her." 

"Ah, but you will!" 

"I hope sincerely I shall not," Mrs. Elles muttered, 
under her breath. Mrs. Popham might be a noble 
soul, and a very fair water-colour artist, but still a 
woman with surely an enquiring mind and a scent 
for irregular situations. 

She began to dread the Pophams and Jane Anne, 
and to regard them as natural enemies. Jane Anne 
she could not avoid meeting about the house, and the 
girl was so antipathetic to her that she made a point 
of not encountering her eyes, and did this so obviously 
as to provoke an enmity which, possibly, had so far 
only existed in her own imagination. 

The vicar and his wife, whether by accident or 



102 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

design, never crossed her path. One day, when she 
made her accustomed pilgrimage to Brignal, she saw 
that Rivers was not alone, and, at first, thought it 
was the sacerdotal back that blotted the fan* land- 
scape. But it was not Mr. Popham's; it was that of 
the opulent farmer on whose land Rivers had taken 
up his position, and with whom the dispute of the 
pig's unlawful consumption of Naples yellow had long 
been arranged amicably. Farmer Ward was standing 
by the side of the artist, passing his felt wide-awake 
from one hand to the other and staring up into the sky 
as if he expected the first rain-drop of the autumn to 
fall on his expectant features from moment to moment. 

"No, it won't rain to-day," Rivers was saying, 
decidedly, "but yon had better make the most of the 
opportunity, for I won't vouch for this spell of 
weather lasting." 

"Aal reet, Measter, I'll take yer word for't. . . . 
Ye see, Miss," he turned to the young woman who 
now approached, "artisses and sech like, they seem 
to know the meanin' of it all! " he waved his hand 
comprehensively round the horizon, "a deal better 
nor we do." 

"We are bound to notice it," said Rivers, indul- 
gently. "You see, the weather affects our crops, 
too!" He pointed to his canvas. 

"Ha! Ha! Measter, I takes ye! And if I might be 
so bold as to ask, what might ye happen to get for that 
little pectewer there? A matter o' fifteen shillin' 
or saxteen, maybe." 



THE HUMAN INTEEEST 103 

"My good man, how do you think I could possibly 
live at that rate? I have been at this thing a month 
already!" 

"Ay, ay, Measter, but then, some folks is pertiekler 
slow!" 

"There's a snub for me!" whispered Rivers to 
Mrs. Elles. 

"But it's agrand pectewer, all the same," continued 
the honest farmer, "though I'd like it better a deal, 
I must say, if there was a bit o' life in it, just a hen 
and chicken preening about maybe, or a bit doggie, 
ye knaw, or even the young leddie here! . . . Well, 
I'll just be going now, I'm thinkin' !" 

He touched his cap and withdrew, tactfully, con- 
scious that the "gentry" might perhaps be getting a 
little tired of him. 

"Why do you never put people into your pictures?" 
Mrs. Elles enquired. "I confess I am like Farmer 
Ward; I should like it better, too!" 

"Somehow, I never care much for the human 
interest in landscape." 

"Or in life either?" Mrs. Elles hazarded. It was 
the same remark she had made to Egidia. 

"I don't know anything about that," he replied, 
distantly, "but I think the introduction of figures is 
always somewhat of an insult to landscape. One 
ought to be able to make a transcript of nature 
interesting without the adventitious aid of figures, it 
seems to me, though certainly Turner had no such 
theory. There is generally a boy and a kite, or a 



104 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

man and a dog in the foreground of his pictures. 
There is^ often a suggestion of cruelty, of tor- 
ture of animals that I could wish a\vay, for in- 
stance " 

"Yes, you do hate people!" Mrs. Elles insisted, 
unconsciously cutting short his little dissertation on 
his idol, Turner, far too impersonal in its application 
to interest her. "You have all the instincts of a 
recluse, although you force yourself to he civil to 
bores when they come your way. Tell me, didn't 
you hate me when I first came?" 

'You took me hy storm rather," he admitted. 
"You were so rapid in your tactics that you didn't 
even give me time to harden my heart against you. 
Of course I am speaking of you as a mere tourist, as I 
thought you were the first time I saw you. And I 
was rather rude to you at first?" 

"Very," she said. "You did your best to put me 
off the inn, but you are not sorry now that you 
failed, are you?" 

"Of course I am not!" he replied, cordially, and it 
was quite the nicest and most encouraging thing he 
had ever said to her. 

"It seems to me that I have frightened away your 
other bore the Vicar," she said, carelessly. "He 
never comes here, and she has never called on me, as 
you said she would. Not that I think you mind not 
seeing anyone! Yes, you are an arrant hermit at 
heart Shelley must have meant you when he wrote 
Alaetor the Spirit of Solitude. I was reading that 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 105 



the other day in your Shelley ; I am studying Shelley, 
now." 

"I admit that my instincts are unsociable," he said, 
with his brush between his teeth. "I don't see how 
I am to help it. The conditions of a landscape 
painter's life make it necessarily a very solitary and 
inhuman one. You see I am in the country for the 
greater part of the year, and I never tell anyone 
where I go. I call my pictures by fanciful titles, so 
as not to have to put the name of the place in the 
catalogues. It is absurd, but then it happens to be 
the only way I can work. I generally don't open my 
lips from June to November, at least not to talk to 
persons of culture! The other sort doesn't matter." 

"Don't you care to study people?" she said. 

"It is my business to study the physiognomy of 
clouds, the character of tree trunks, not faces!" 

"Don't speak so ferociously!" she said laughingly. 
"You mean that your only books are not women's 
looks. It is Nature who is your mistress " 

"Yes, and a nice capricious mistress she is, and very 
hard her service!" 

"But she never did betray the heart that loved her 
we have that on good authority!" 

"Betray no, but she does lead him a dance!" the 
artist exclaimed passionately. "She rains her tears 
on him, she blows hurricanes on him, she plagues him 
with flies, and, what is worse, wasps she lets him 
break his back, and contract his chest with stooping, 
the better to deal with her. She is never the same 



106 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

for two minutes together. She is exacting and 
exclusive. 'Thou shalt have no other mistress but 
me!' she says. 'You shall dance attendance on all 
my moods, and submit to all my caprices, and you 
shall go on trying to paint the unpaintable all your 
life, and die before you have succeeded in doing it!' " 

The painter, having grown a little serious and 
excited over his own tirade, ended it with a little laugh 
at himself, and she murmured with apparent inconse- 
quence, "Oh, I think it such a pity such a waste!" 

"What do you mean?" he asked her, negligently, 
and stayed not for an answer it was a little way he 
had. She would have been ashamed to admit to him 
what her meaning had been ; that he was still young, 
that he was handsome, that, in her opinion, such a 
man was thrown away on the service of Nature. She 
changed the conversation by offering to read him some 
passages from the Newcastle paper. 

He nodded in assent. She first gathered and 
fastened two large fern fronds behind each ear, as a 
clerk his pen, to keep away the flies which Rivers' 
mistress Nature continued to send him. She felt 
herself already so hideously travestied, that an 
added touch of grotesqueness or so did not matter. 
Then she began to read aloud in her quick, impulsive 
way. She had not read more than a few sentences, 
when she stopped suddenly. The painter might, or 
might not, have been attending to her, but the sud- 
den cessation of her voice inevitably excited his 
attention. 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 107 

"Well?" he asked her sharply. 

"I stopped. It was getting so dull in that part of 
the paper," she said, confusedly, bent on herself 
getting the gist of a certain paragraph that had 
caught her eye. 

It was an account of an archaeological meeting that 
had recently been held in Newcastle, where Mr. 
Mortimer Elles had seconded the motion of somebody 
or other, and had "given an exceedingly humorous 
turn" to the debate. 

She pored over it with a certain sense of bitterness, 
mingled with relief. 

"So he is cheerful enough to make bad jokes! 
He is getting on all right. I need not have troubled 
to be anxious ! He will have told all my friends and 
his that his gadding fool of a wife is away amusing 
herself on a visit. He is quite clever enough to 
invent some excuse like that! Men don't care to 
admit that they have been run away from!" 

Mr. Kivers had meanwhile idly taken up the few 
letters she had brought and laid down beside him as 
usual, ready to his hand. He was quite capable of 
leaving them for hours unopened, to her continual 
surprise and somewhat to her annoyance. She could 
not understand dilatoriness in such matters. But he 
was reading one now, of which the immense signature 
inevitably caught her eye. It was Egidia's real name 
Alice Giles which she happened to know. 

"I had a few letters this morning," she remarked, 
pointedly, "but they were all very dull." 



108 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

"This one of mine is rather amusing," returned 
the guileless artist. "It is from my cousin I dare- 
say you know her by the name she writes under 
'Egidia.' " 

4 'Why, I told you I did when I first came here!" 
she exclaimed. "Don't you remember? It is through 
Egidia that we know each other. And is that from 
her? Oh, do, if you can, read me some of it." 

Eivers tossed the letter into her lap. 

"Read it all, if you like. It is a lively account of 
her Northern experiences. There seem to be some 
odd types in Newcastle, to judge by what she says!" 

Thus empowered, Phoebe Elles devoured the letter. 
A great many of her friends were mentioned in it 
the poet, Miss Drummond, and Mrs. Poynder, while 
there was a whole page entirely devoted to the muse 
of Newcastle. 

"I met her at a lecture I was giving. Somebody 
or other on the platform introduced us. I had 
noticed her big eyes fixed on me, and her lips parted, 
following every word I said. It was nattering. She 
implored me to call. It was because I wrote books. 
I went because I liked her. She was an audience in 
herself! And her home! She has, I could see, a 
hard fight of it, poor little thing, to cultivate culture 
there. It was quite pathetic to see her straining 
every nerve to be modern and morbid and blase, as 
she thinks we are in London. But give me the 
provinces for morbidity and unconscious Ibsenism! 
In spite of her amusing little affectations and pre- 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 109 

ciousnesses, she is a dear little woman, and I think I 
shall ask her to come and stay with me in town 
there is no one who would enjoy it more. If I do, 
you must come and meet her, you would like her. 
Pretty, too, though I don't think you care much 
about that. But so intensely interested in every- 
thing, so eager, too nervous, perhaps, to be soothing, 
a woman with more brain than temperament, and 
perhaps not so very much of that. Incapable, I 
should think, of a grande passion, but so anxious to 
have one ! She is really to be pitied, I think, for the 
milieu she lives in is naturally abhorrent to one of her 
way of thinking. It is unfortunately that of nine- 
tenths of her class, the provincial women whose wits 
outrun their opportunities, and their aspirations their 
social possibilities. The type is so sadly common. 
English Madame Bovarys ! 

"She has a husband, but I did not see him. I was 
going to dine there to meet him, but she put me off. 
Perhaps he explains her. At any rate, from what she 
told me, and allowing for her very strong bias, he 
furnishes a very good excuse for any vagaries she may 
choose to commit. I believe he drinks, though she 
did not say so, and I respected her for not giving him 
away. An ordinary, middle-class brute, my dear 
Edmund, incapable of making even a goose happy, 
far less a woman who has educated herself into some 
of the subtleties of refinement. 

"I don't know why I write all this about a perhaps 
not specially interesting person, but her eyes when 



110 THE HUMAN INTEEEST 

she looked at me, and was not posing ! were the eyes 
of a prisoner. I see them now!" 

Interesting as this document was to the subject of 
it, there were things about it that she did not quite 
like. She was silent for a little time, quite ten 
minutes. Then an irresistible impulse prompted her 
to say, "I happen to know that woman Egidia writes 
of, very well." 

"Do you really? Then perhaps I ought not to 
have shown you the letter. One never knows.'" 

"Oh, it doesn't matter. Phcebe Elles is one of my 
greatest friends poor thing!" 

"Why poor thing?" 

"Oh, don't you know she is one of the unhappy 
ones. She made the usual mistake, ten years ago, 
and has been repenting it ever since." 

"What was that?" 

"She married, that's all. They all do it. But 
Phoebe my friend complicated matters by marrying 
a man who was unworthy of her, though I am 
bound to say she was in love with him at the time 
she married him or thought she was." 

"If she thought so, she probably was," came from 
behind the easel. 

"You think that proves it? Well, 'there is nothing 
either good or bad but thinking makes it so,' as 
Hamlet says. However, poor Phoebe Elles never knew 
what it was to be happy with the man she had chosen, 
though she had a vague idea that there was happiness 
somewhere in the world for her, as all we poor deluded 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 111 

fools of women have. There was nothing to make 
her happy, her life was starved, maimed, stunted no 
colour in it at all. He had been married before, and 
the house was full of what shall I call them? 
obstacles to sentiment, in the shape of stepsons, and 
awful aunts " 

"How many aunts?" 

"Only one, perhaps, but a horror, a perfectly awful 
woman! I shall never forget what I " 

She recovered herself and went on. "He her 
husband was not unkind to her not cruel, oh no, he 
took good care of that! but he contrived to make 
himself generally odious to her, and was antagonistic 
in every possible way " 

"Poor man !" ejaculated Eivers, in rather an incom- 
prehensible manner. 

"Then," Mrs. Elles went on, complacently, warm- 
ing to her subject, "there came a final scene such a 
sordid affair too, but it brought matters to a head. 
He sent away all her servants at an hour's notice, on 
the very flimsiest of pretexts, and when she ventured, 
very naturally, to expostulate, he turned round on 
her and insulted her grossly. He told her that he 
had never loved her, but had only married her out of 
pity, because she had so obviously set her affections 
on him; and that now, when she had entirely lost 
her looks and her youth " 

"The man must have been an utter cad." 

"Yes, wasn't he!" exclaimed Mrs. Elles, delighted 
with his concurrence. "I was sure you would say 



113 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

so. And then he abused her and called her names 
I am sure you could never bring yourself to use such 
words as he used to Phcebe, to your wife!" She 
snatched a fearful joy in the use of this phrase. 

"No, I suppose not," said Bivers, who, for some 
reason or other, did not seem inclined to treat this 
story very seriously. "No, I suppose not, unless she 
aggravated me beyond endurance. Then there is no 
knowing what I might not say." 

"Oh, yes, I quite understand, if she was a nagging 
woman but poor Phoebe I know her so well is 
incapable of anything of the sort. She is too gentle 
ever to make a fuss and too dignified, besides. She 
behaved simply like an angel all through a perfect 
martyr she hardly said a word, but " 

"But what?" 

"She did the only thing that was left her to do. 
She left him." 

"I call that rather a strong measure!" 

"Oh, but alone! She did not leave him to go to 
another man!" 

Here the narrator of Phoebe Elles' fortunes stopped 
and hesitated, a little overcome by a reflection that 
necessarily occurred to her. Presently she resumed. 
"Tell me, do you disapprove of poor Phoebe?" 

"I can hardly form an opinion, can I, without 
knowing the rights and wrongs of the case. But as 
a general thing Was he unfaithful to her?" 

"No indeed, she only wishes he were!" Mrs. Elles 
broke out, in an uncontrollable burst of candour. 



THE HUMAN INTEEEST 113 

"Now, I've shocked yon," she said, looking tip into 
his face and bitterly repenting her flippant outspoken- 
ness. 

She went on, nervously, "You think she ought to 
have stuck to her post ought not to have thrown up 
her cards like that." 

She was translating the thoughts that she thought 
she could read on his face, and expostulating with 
them. "But still, you know, I had a woman has 
surely a right to live her own life?" 

"Only another phrase for selfishness," he retorted 
vehemently. "I hate it. Nobody has a right. Our 
lives are far too inextricably bound up with other lives 
for us to be able to assume complete freedom. We 
can't live our own lives anything like it for the 
very sufficient reason that it isn't to be done without 
spoiling other people's." 

"But you seem to be able to manage to do it live 
your own life in the way I mean?" Mrs. Elles 
retorted, in the heat of argument, carrying the war 
into the enemy's country. 

"I am a selfish beggar, I daresay, and don't prac- 
tice what I preach." 

He spoke sharply, bending down over his drawing, 
and she felt that she had been tactless to force the 
personal application. 

She fancied that it was a touch of remorse at his 
curtness that made him say presently, in a benignant 
manner, "And what is your friend doing now?" 

"Oh, Phcebe is all right for the present. She is 



114 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

comparatively free ; she does not have to sit opposite 
that man at breakfast every morning and listen to his 
coarse jokes and shiver at his impossible manners all 
day long. Now, she is in the society of persons 
congenial to her, at least. ... I really must write to 
Phoabe." 

"Don't bring her here, for heaven's sake!" 
exclaimed Rivers, in real or affected alarm. "I 
should have to pack up my traps and bolt at once." 

"Oh, don't be afraid of poor Phoabe!" pleaded 
Mrs. Elles, not without some appreciation of the 
humour of the situation. 

"You really wouldn't mind her if you knew her, I 
do assure you. Anyhow she wouldn't be any worse 
than I." 

"Oh, by Jove, though, but she would! A woman 
with a grievance is worse than anything else in the 
world." 

"Of course," Mrs. Elles replied, with some dignity 
she did not like being snubbed, even in the person 
of her pseudo-self, "I am not thinking of asking 
Phoabe here. I shall not even put an address when I 
write. I will send the letter to a friend to forward. 
You know I have my own reasons for not wishing the 
world to know where I am at present." 

She made this statement for about the hundredth 
time, and the artist, as usual, completely ignored the 
allusion to her ambiguous position at Greta Bridge. 
And yet he was obviously Bohemian, but of the 
world where such social rules are used to be enforced. 



THE HUMAN INTEKEST 115 

Another instance of the anomalousness of the artist 
nature ! 

She was not without tact, though she was so 
impulsive, and she now fancied, with the morbid and 
strained apprehension of one whose feelings are deeply 
engaged, that he was colder to her as they walked 
home together. She felt, in some indefinable way, 
that she had lost ground with him, and that her 
relation of and flippant comments on the story of 
Phcabe Elles had been the cause of it. 

Her brain was working furiously as she walked on, 
treading rough and smooth at his side, her head 
bowed, and her eyes fixed on the enormous dried-up 
hoof marks that the cows had made on then* way 
down the bank to drink at the ford, and into which 
she sedulously and mechanically made a point of fit- 
ting her little foot. Higher up, in the upland field, 
the footpath was so narrow that she was obliged to 
walk, not beside, but in front of Eivers, who was 
universally beloved of farmers because of his fixed 
principle never heedlessly to widen a footpath, though 
he would fight tooth and nail for the right of way. 
He and she were thus perforce more or less silent, 
but nothing would have surprised the modest artist 
more than to think that he himself was the subject of 
the cogitations that were agitating the brain behind 
the little knot of brown curls which was presented to 
his gaze, as they walked along about a yard apart 
from each other. 

' ' I have vexed him I have shocked him ! He is a 



116 THE HUMAN INTEEEST 

gentleman, and he isn't modern, thank God ! and I 
have talked flippantly of things that a gentleman 
and an old-fashioned gentleman takes seriously. He 
has a higher moral standard than I have, and I have 
been fool enough to let him see that mine is lower. 
How tiresome!" 

Then she consoled herself a little. "He is sweet, 
but he is not quite human. It is very easy to talk 
about duties and self-effacement and all that, but 
what can a bachelor he is not married, I am sure 
what can a hermit, a recluse, know of the stress of 
life? How can a bachelor possibly enter into the 
agonies of the married? How can Alastor sympathize 
with the miseries of Incompatibles?" 

"You must think me a very odd kind of woman," 
she said to him that night, adding hastily: "That is, 
if you think about me at all." 

It was a habit of hers to put leading questions of 
this kind to the artist, but generally, like Pilate, she 
stayed not for an answer, and nervously hastened to 
fill up the pause by a further remark of her own. 
The result was a somewhat one-sided conversation. 

"Yes, I am mysterious, I suppose," she went on, 
leaning her elbows on the table in front of her and 
looking fixedly at him through her glasses. She had 
drunk nothing but water at dinner, yet her cheeks 
burned with an unaccountable flush, and her eyes 
were bright with excitement. 

"How strange it is !" she went on. "You cannot 
have the remotest idea of what I am really like as if 



THE HUMAN INTEEEST 117 

it mattered!" She laughed apologetically. "It is 
strange, though, to think that though we are such 
friends, you have never seen my face." 

"You mean because you wear those glasses?" he 
replied, in the blunt, matter-of-fact way in which he 
generally did receive her personal allusions, and which 
disconcerted her and drove her to utter desperation 
sometimes. "I suppose you have some good reason 
for wearing them?" 

"I have a reason, but I don't know if it is a good 
one," she replied in tones sharp from nervousness. 

"You wear them under advice, I imagine?" 

"No, really my own idea," she said, airily. "Shall 
I take them off? Tell me to, and I will !" 

Her voice was trembling, her hands were twitching 
with the overmastering desire to do away, once for all, 
with this absurd barrier between them. A woman, 
shorn of her powers, mulcted of her charm, handi- 
capped, at the very moment when she needed the full 
arsenal of her feminine armoury ! That was what she 
was, and his imperturbability irritated her vanity, 
and made it, for the moment, paramount. 

She realized the full gravity of the situation, she 
felt it a turning point, she had attached an almost 
fetish-like importance to the insignia of her virtuous 
resolutions, but in the wild desire to assert her 
womanhood that mastered her now, she was prepared 
to abandon anything and everything that stood in the 
way of its accomplishment. 

"Shall I take them off? Shall I?" was her irre- 



118 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

sponsible cry. "You have advised me to. Bemember 
that." 

There was a pause a century of vital emotion for 
her, the mere opportunity for an added touch of the 
brush on to a ticklish corner of his foreground for the 
painter. 

"Did I?" he asked, carelessly, as she deliberately 
laid aside the spectacles, and looked him full in the 
face. 

But the heavens did not fall or the solid earth fail, 
and with the single unconcerned remark: "I should 
not have said that your eyes were at all weak!" the 
painter continued tranquilly to deposit brushes full of 
diluted sepia and water on to his drawing. There 
were tears in her eyes next time she raised them. 



CHAPTER VI 

Mrs. Elles never put the spectacles on again. They 
had made no difference except to herself. And 
further intimacy with Eivers convinced her that any 
such artificial safeguards against flirtation were quite 
unnecessary. 

She realized his want of sympathy and humanity, 
his elaborate attitude of standing aside from the prob- 
lems of life in favour of a closer contemplation of 
those of Nature. It was Nature he loved, and Nature 
only, with his full heart. The human interest was a 
purely secondary consideration with him. Not "in 
many mortal forms" did he seek "the shadow of that 
idol." He was Alastor and she was the Lady. She 
must remember that. Alastor could doubtless have 
done quite well without the Lady. She represented 
the ever -restless Spirit of Humanity which Alastor 
had come into the wilderness to avoid. And, for his 
sake, for the sake of her valued privileges, she must 
learn to keep it in abeyance and suppress it as far as 
she could. She must love Nature too. It was 
difficult, for though, in her quality of romanticist, 
she had always talked a good deal about it, Nature, 
to her, was merely a background for people, just as 
flowers were an adornment for her bodice or her 
parlour. 

119 



120 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

But the very conditions of her tenure here 
demanded that she should accommodate herself to 
the mood of her companion. Since, by happy chance, 
she was admitted to be an inmate with him of the ter- 
restrial Paradise of which he was the tutelary God, 
she must contrive, as animals do, to adapt herself to 
her new habitat. She thought of herself as a tremu- 
lous, storm-tossed soul, newly entered into bliss, and 
afraid to compromise her precarious happiness by any 
assumption of right or too marked a signalizing of her 
presence there. 

With this end in view, she began to cultivate a 
capacity for silence, an art of self-effacement, a spirit- 
like vagueness of outline. Her wish was to dissimu- 
late her personality as far as was possible, and merely 
to form, as it were, part of the silent, unobtrusive 
world of Nature that he loved. It was a stiff noviti- 
ate to a complete education. 

Her plan was successful, on the whole. The painter 
began to take her as a matter of course, to treat her 
as if she had always been there, as a busy man might 
treat a sister, or a college companion, without cere- 
mony, but with much protective kindness and cama- 
raderie. She was sure that the notion of her being in 
any way compromised by her stay with him in this 
lonely inn never so much as entered his mind. It 
was not that he was ignorant of conventions ; he was 
simply too preoccupied to think of them. 

But, indeed, the new brightness of her eyes, bred 
of her happiness, the lovely, natural colour in her 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 121 

cheeks, the conscious curve of her red lips, inevitably 
suggested the world's cry for a chaperon. She had 
been an interesting woman when she came to Eokeby ; 
she was now almost a beautiful one. The little hol- 
lows in her cheeks had filled up; her figure had 
improved; she was like a blue serge wood nymph 
darting about the broken pathways and shelving 
banks of this embowered painter's paradise. 

She knew, with a woman's intuition, that he was 
not entirely blind to her beauty. His eye rested on 
her with the same searching and affectionate gaze 
with which it might linger on a "beautiful bit," as 
the technical phrase runs ; and the light in her eyes and 
the changes in her expression, as the varying moods 
flitted over her face, were to him as the cloud shadows 
chasing each other over Barningham Moor, or the 
sunlight glinting in the brown pools of the Greta 
where it was deepest. It was something, but not 
enough. A woman does not care to be looked at as 
if she were a landscape by the man whom she pas- 
sionately loves. She longed to draw from him some 
personal expression of admiration; but, beyond an 
occasional "Well done!" upon the performance of 
some unusually agile feat of climbing, she was 
always disappointed. 

Others noticed the improvement in her looks and 
health and told her of it. 

"On my word, Miss," remarked the landlady of 
the "Heather Bell" to her, one afternoon, when she 
was "learning her," by a course of practical demon- 



122 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

stration, to make the cake of the country, "ye're 
fair credit to the 'Heather Bell!' Ye look twice the 
woman ye did when ye first corned here, not near so 
peaked and piny like! I'll be bound the gentleman 
thinks so, too! Eh, we shall see what we shall see!" 

"What shall we see, Mrs. Watson?" asked Mrs. 
Elles, complaisantly, leaning her elbows on the floury 
table. She was always most susceptible to any kind 
of compliment, and to do her justice, she had no 
idea of the woman's meaning. 

"You and he will be setting up together, one of 
these fine days! Eh, I see what I see! I'm none 
blind, honey." 

"Nonsense, Mrs. Watson!" 

"Nae nonsense at all! He tak's a good deal o' 
notish on ye, I consider. I was just a-saying sae to 
oor Jane Anne later than yesterday. Sorrow befaa' 
my tongue she's fair upset aboot it, I can tell ye!" 

"Jane Anne! Upset?" 

"Ay, sure, who but Jane Anne Cawthorne? She's 
got a bit fancy for Mr. Eivers herseP, ye mun knaw. 
She sends a' the ither lads away on his account, he 
that's never thinkin' of her! I whiles say to her, 
'Hont, lass, he'll never tak' that much notice on ye, 
beyond lending ye some beuk ye's a deal better with- 
out.' I don't hold wi' readin', mysel', he knaw. 
But the fond lass shakes her head and says nowt, and 
throws away the bonny flowers ye put in his glass, 
and sets some on her own pickin' there." 

"Yes, I have noticed that," said Mrs. Elles sharply. 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 123 

"And I'll wager he's niver so much as gien her a 
chuck on the chin, for all she's walk barefoot to 
Barney Cassel and back for him. Eh, it's you that's 
got him. Mistress Popham was axing me, only the other 
day, when ye was going to get the vicar to call ye?" 

"Callus! What's that?" 

"Ask ye; call the banns in church. Eh, that'll be 
a grand day for us all. Noo, there's a bonny cake," 
she ended, clapping it on to the "girdle," "and you 
and he can have it cold to your teas." 

"Did you ever lend or give Jane Anne books?" she 
asked Eivers, at dinner, that night. 

"I ordered her a set of George Eliot's novels once," 
he said, "and all Scott's. She's clever enough to get 
something out of them. I see that from what she 
says to me about them. She is quite a superior girl." 

"I don't like her, and she doesn't like me. And 
novels that she only half understands put things 
into her head that are better out of it. Now, suppose 
this girl, Jane Anne, were to write to my people and 
betray me," she said, with a slightly simulated ex- 
pression of apprehension. 

"Why should she betray you?" he said, showing by 
his slight accent on the betray that he thought it 
somewhat too forcible. "She would have no object. " 

"Oh no!" said Mrs. Elles. "I am not a criminal. 
And besides, there is no one for her to betray me to. 
I owe nobody any allegiance. I am perfectly inde- 
pendent. There is not a soul in the world who cares 
what becomes of me!" 



124 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

She sighed appropriately as she uttered this fiction, 
but if she had expected Mr. Rivers to openly com- 
miserate her, she was disappointed. It was by no 
means the first time. Alastor always refused to take 
any interest in the fortunes of the Lady before she 
came to him. 

She wondered if he even took in the idea of the 
lonely and friendless condition. Did he really swal- 
low the legend of herself that she had been at such 
pains to concoct and serve up to him when she first 
came? 

The lies she had told him, in the light of the new 
morality that her intercourse with his blameless recti- 
tude had flashed upon her, began to weigh heavily 
upon her regenerate soul. He was so straight, so 
sincere, so guileless, so simple, she might tell him 
what she chose and he would credit her story as that 
of one holding the same rigid code of honour as him- 
self. She was beginning to realize, as she had never 
realized before, what that code of honour what every 
gentleman's code of honour was. 

It was not so much that it was wrong to lie, but it 
was a mark of ill-breeding, and her cheeks burned at 
the recollection of the imposition she had practised 
was still practising on this gentleman. 

He had asked her no questions, and she had told 
him lies ! 

The only little point of comfort which she could 
wrest for herself from circumstances was the possibil- 
ity that he had not chosen to burden his mind full 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 125 

of tree and cloud forms, and such artistic lumber 
with her story as she had related it to him. Was it 
likely that a man, with his strange and disconcerting 
capacity for the ignoring of details and all the minor 
facts of life, should have permitted anything so human 
and unimportant to make an impression on his mind? 
No, it had probably glided off him, while every 
mutation of the sunset they had watched together 
yesterday was indelibly fixed in his memory. Of 
what consequence were she and her trifling affairs in 
comparison? So she thought and hoped, in the new 
humility which her love for him had engendered in her. 

Still, in spite of these halcyon days, it was impos- 
sible that she could entirely shut out the thought of 
the future. Things could not stay as they were. 
The stack of canvas umbrella covers, and packing 
cases, piled out of the way in all the four corners of 
the sitting-room, reminded the poor young woman 
only too painfully of the dies irae, dies ilia when the 
autumn tints, beloved of amateurs, would begin to 
show and bear their indubitable message. The leaves 
would turn brown and fall, and the lover of Nature 
would pack up his colour box, and strap his easels 
together, and look out a train in Bradshaw, and order 
the trap over-night to take him to the station at 
Barnard Castle. 

What should she say then? What should she do? 
He was everything to her, and she was nothing to 
him. She was the wife of Mortimer Elles, and her 
home was in Newcastle ! 



126 THE HUMAN INTEKEST 

But it was borne in upon her that, come what 
might, she could never go back to Mortimer. The 
mere contemplation of a renewed term of life with 
him was terrible and impossible to her, now that she 
had known the greatest good, the highest development 
of which human nature was capable, in the person of 
this man in whose intimacy she was living. 

There were times when she could not bear her own 
thoughts, when she would jump up and leave the 
room where Eivers sat composedly working, and, 
hatless and cloakless, run out into the moonlit road 
and even into the Park itself. The painter, in his 
absorption, would never even look up or seem to hear 
the panting breaths that betrayed her emotion. 

Bitterly did she con this and other signs of his 
indifference, as she wandered deviously about the 
glades and alleys of the great demesne, now under the 
staring moonlight, now where the over-arching trees 
shut it hopelessly out and made walking a mere mat- 
ter of outstretched hands and groping steps. Even 
the darksome yew grove the haunt of the Lady of 
Mortham had no terrors for her now. Love casts 
out fear ; a woman in her state of mind has no horror 
of the supernatural. 

One night, the most beautiful moonlight night of 
the whole year, she wandered far into the Park and 
along to the banks of the Greta, where it runs under 
the shadow of the cliffs crowned with fir trees, and 
the desolate tower of Mortham stands out against the 
sky behind them. She scrambled down the bank, 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 127 

on the hither side, to one of the little stretches of 
pebbly shore that line the stream here and there and 
stood wistfully gazing into its flow, her hands crossed 
at the back of her neck, a white lady, "mystic, 
wonderful." 

The further shore lay all in mysterious shadow, but 
at her feet was a sheet of rippling silver, with dark 
oily rocks, like islands or sleeping seals, breaking 
through its course here and there. She saw, in 
imagination, a drowned woman lying there in mid- 
stream, face upwards, caught among the snags and 
snares that clogged the shallows, and irradiated by 
the same moon rays that turned the brown water white. 

"Look there!" she said, wildly, turning sharply 
round to Rivers, who was standing behind her. 
"Look! I see myself there!" 

She was so wrought up that she felt and showed 
no surprise at his presence. It was so picturesquely 
natural that she should be standing there in the 
moonlight, on the bank of the most romantic river in 
the whole world, with the only man she had ever loved. 
Time and chance had combined to bring about this 
hour. Rivers had never thought of following her 
before. 

But he completely ignored her morbid speech. She 
was hurt, though, indeed, it was what she might 
have expected. She said no more, but stood looking 
tragically down into the flood. 

"By Jove, but it is fine!" the artist presently mur- 
mured to himself, in tones of deep conviction. 



128 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

Nature mere non-sentient, abstract Nature again 
and a woman, eager, passionate and romantic, 
standing by him ! 

"Don't you wish you had your sketch book here?" 
that woman asked him, bitterly. 

"Oh, I can remember it!" he replied, simply. 
"But I am very glad I came out. How did you hap- 
pen to know there was a moon, and that she would be 
shining over this reach of the river?" 

"I didn't know," she said. "I just came out I 
don't know why I suppose, because I was restless." 

She sighed, and fingered her sash, and sighed again. 

"How did you know where I had gone? I have 
been" reproachfully "an hour away, and you 
never even looked up when I left the room!" 

"I missed you, though," he said. "I feel things, 
sometimes, when I am very busy, without seeing 
them." 

"Perhaps, then, it occurred to you that I might 
have got into mischief," she went on lightly. "You 
didn't know that I come here nearly every night?" 

"Why not?" 

"And yet this is the first time you have followed 
me!" she said, regretfully. "Yes, I come here, night 
after night, and I look down into this pool, and I 
imagine myself lying in it with my face turned up to 
the moon, drowned and dead, and at an end of all my 
troubles, and you hearing of it, and being a little a 
very little sorry for me!" 

"But you are surely not thinking of committing 



THE HUMAN INTEEEST 129 

suicide, are you?" he asked her, quite calmly, "for, 
really, no one would have the slightest excuse for 
falling in off this miniature beach?" 

She made a gesture of impatience then she 
laughed, in tragic impotence. 

"One can drown oneself in a teacup, if one has a 
mind. But I think I will go up the bank, now, and 
put myself out of the reach of temptation." 

4 'Do you want to go indoors? If not, let us walk a 
little way to the Junction, if you don't mind? I 
want to see the Greta meet the Tees under this 
strong moonlight. It must be magnificent. It is a 
shame to stay in the house when the moon is out like 
this. Browning speaks of her 'unhandsome thrift 
of silver.' There's plenty of her now, isn't there? 
Glorious ! It is a night of nights !" 

Mrs. Elles agreed with him but from a different 
point of view. 

"Are you frightened?" he asked her, as they left 
the river bank and began gropingly to follow a track 
between two darknesses of tangled brushwood. 

"Not with you!" she said, manfully; and he did 
not offer his arm. 

She walked along, a little in front of him, in the 
narrow path they had chosen, a short cut to the place 
where the two rivers meet. She was wearing her 
thin, clinging white gown, and, without the unro- 
mantic adjuncts of hat, parasol, or gloves, she looked 
as ghostly, as unreal, as far removed from the com- 
monplace, as even she herself could have wished. 



130 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

They reached the Junction, just outside the Park 
confines, where the brown moorland flood of the 
Greta, hasty, capricious, passionate, like herself, 
merged into the broad, calm flood of the Tees flow- 
ing quietly, in its great volume and depth, over its 
granite-bouldered bed under Wycliffe. Eivers, for 
some reason or other, took off his hat, stood his hair 
looking quite white in the moonshine silent, his 
artist soul, presumably, stirred to the very depths by 
the mysterious harmonies of tone and magnificent 
lines of composition which the sight afforded him. 

"How well that comes!" he murmured, passion- 
ately, while the woman beside him stood breathless, 
affected, too, by the vision, but in her own way; 
weaving her fanciful, personal allegories of him, and 
her, and the two rivers, and longing for some signs 
in him of the more human enthusiasm that she could 
have shared. 

She shivered, but not from cold. "We must go 
back!" he said, in response to her unspoken com- 
plaint. 

They turned and walked up the glen the moon 
had gone behind a cloud, and the Greta lay dull and 
sullen under the hanging terraces of trees. But in 
the yew grove was darkness unspeakable. 

"Oh, I can't see you," she murmured, involun- 
tarily; "I shall lose you!" 

He silently held out his hand to her, and she 
took it. 

When they came out into the Broad Walk where it 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 131 

was lighter, she dutifully made a little movement to 
withdraw her hand a very slight movement but he 
did not accept it. 

He had forgotten ! Was there another man in the 
world who could thus hold and retain a woman's hand 
without knowing it? 

In all her life, such pure, unalloyed happiness had 
not been hers, as they walked up to the gates of the 
Park together. It was just ten o'clock. 

In the hall of the inn, he lit her candle, as usual, 
and gave it to her. She held it just under her chin, 
and it lighted up her face, blanched and spiritualized 
by the emotions she had gone through. He looked at 
her, for once, very closely. 

"You look, to-night," he said, in the dreamy 
voice he only used sometimes, "like the Spirit of the 
Greta that peered through the window at me the 
other night. I told you about it at the time, did I 
not? It was a strange hallucination! Quite white 
and pale, and its eyes fixed meaningly on me. The 
lines of the face, as I remember it now, were curiously 
like yours, or is it that you have identified yourself 
with that spirit in my thoughts? I have never got it 
quite out of my head, do you know!" 

"TVhy should you try?" was all that Phcebe Biles 
could find to say. A mist seemed to have come over 
her eyes, and she bade him "good-night," and 
stumbled helplessly over her gown as she went 
upstairs. 

She lay awake all night. She cried quietly to her- 



132 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

self. This was what she had wanted. This was life. 
She was very happy and yet most miserable. 

Did this man care for her? Yes? No? A little? 
There was no knowing. His ways were not as the 
ways of other men at least, not the men she had 
known and the ordinary canons of flirtation, as she 
knew them, had no correspondence with his conduct 
towards her. 

She thought he liked her ; she knew she loved him ; 
that was what it all came to. 

She was an honourable woman, with a newly super- 
added canon of honour, and she did not dream of 
being false to her husband. If Eivers loved her as 
she loved him, she ought to go away. That was her 
clear duty to herself, to him and to Mortimer. 

Mortimer would take her back of that she had not 
the slightest doubt. There was no reason why he 
should ever hear of this, her vagary, among the green 
shades of Brignal. She might take the train back to 
Newcastle, refuse to give any further account of her- 
self than that she had been away for a holiday or any 
reason for that holiday except the usual "nerves" of 
society, and resume her end of the matrimonial chain 
without let or hindrance. 

But since she was uncertain as to Rivers' feelings 
with regard to her, hardly that, indeed, since he gave 
her, literally, no reason to suppose that he looked 
upon her in any other light than the light of a friend, 
might she not oh, might she not ! take the benefit 
of the doubt and stay there till he went away, and be 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 133 

as happy as she could for as long as she could? She 
felt that she must not quarrel with Elvers' reserve, 
since it gave her the title to his company. She 
decided not to do so. 

She was beginning to find him less obscure, for she 
had learned to seek for the expression of him in his 
art : the art by which he chose to reveal himself to 
those who had the will and the skill to read. Where 
other men spoke or wrote, he painted. She had only 
to look at the beautifully stained bits of paper that 
issued from his hand, to watch the wonderful combi- 
nations of colour subtle, passionate, striking, tender 
that were evolved by this man of few words, to see 
that he was no stranger to the whole gamut of human 
emotions, full of delightful, undisciplined moods, and 
mutabilities, and pleasant perversions of character. 
There were strength and force in certain abrupt combi- 
nations that stirred like the sound of a trumpet; 
there were tenderness and the fancif ulness that women 
love in certain harmonies that moved almost to tears. 
She read sentiment and sweetness in the delicacy of 
his sunsets, and character and passion in the gloom of 
deep cloud-shadows, and sullen mist-wreaths lurking 
in clefts and hollows of the hills, and mystery in the 
tangled undergrowth whose complication and variety 
he rendered so well. 

There was one drawing of his that she specially 
cared for, and whose progress she surveyed as she 
might that of a beloved child of his brain and hers. 
"Oh, Brignal Banks are wild and fair!" says the lady 



134 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

in Scott's ballad, and. here they were, caught and 
immortalized forever on one piece of Whatman's 
paper, three feet by two. There was hardly any sky 
in it. The leafy, heavily-berried coverts hung tossing 
from the cliff, streaming down to the water's edge, 
that lay, in brown pools, deep and immutable, like a 
true man's heart, at its base. In the immediate fore- 
ground was the broken mass of stones that formed the 
bed of the wayward river that had so many moods, 
both of grave and gay. There the painter sat, on one 
of these stones, with the water parted and rippling all 
round him, in the most precarious of positions, his 
drawing propped on his knee, uncomfortably, his 
feet nearly in the stream. The burning sun shone 
straight down on his head, for there was no foothold 
for his umbrella in the spot which he had chosen. 
He never spared himself, or complained of the terrible 
constriction of the chest, which the constrained atti- 
tude of stooping necessarily engendered. Perhaps he 
did not notice it in the excitement of his work. She 
sat under his umbrella, on the bank, and watched 
him. 

Morning after morning she sat there, as it were in 
a bay of opalescent colours ; the horizou of her land- 
scape bounded by the pink cliffs and overhanging 
belts of trees, the foreground quivering with refrac- 
tion, and golden with the flowering ragwort. She 
was drunk, but not blind with light, and lulled con- 
tinually by the hum of the bees at their task and the 
self-satisfied purl of the stream at her feet, she sat 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 135 

peacefully noting and enjoying the dreamy transitions 
of a painter's day. 

To herself, she seemed to be fast becoming a "green 
thought in a green shade" the fanciful title of 
Eivers' picture, adopted from his favourite poet, Mar- 
vel her favourite, too, now. Eivers was for ever 
associated in her mind with green, the colour of hope ; 
she had banished grey the colour of despair and 
Newcastle from her mind, as it certainly existed not 
in the landscape before her eyes. Newcastle, under 
its smoky pall, and Eokeby, in its gorgeous vestiture 
of many colours, could not surely form a part of the 
same hemisphere. And the extraordinary thing was, 
that she had run away to find adventure, and had 
found peace! She had thought she had need of a 
world full of men, and now the society of one summed 
up all interest, all excitement, all hope, all that she 
had ever dreamed. She had longed for the fuller 
life of cities ; now a lonely grove by the side of the 
river sufficed her. 

Her eyes she never read, or cared to read were 
continually fixed on the stooping figure, in its neutral 
garb of brown, perched so precariously on a rock in 
mid-stream. In front of his post was the dell of 
Brignal, where the river wound round abruptly, and 
seemed to issue from a darksome hollow, formed by 
the meeting trees on either bank. Suddenly, her eyes 
grew eager and then startled she fancied all was not 
right. Something was different. The hollow was 
filled up. A brown wall of water was gathering from 



136 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

that hollow, was advancing, rushing, with a dull, 
murmurous roar as of distant thunder, straight down 
between the two banks towards the painter. 

She sprang to her feet. 

Rivers had told her of the Bore of the Greta she 
knew how, after a very slight rainfall such as they 
had had, the river was used to come down without 
warning. This was it ! And his life was in danger ! 
She screamed frantically to the artist, whose head had 
for an unconscionable time been bent over his draw- 
ing. She screamed as loudly as she could, but her 
voice came thinly and hoarsely, so he did not hear her. 

Then she began to leap from rock to rock to go to him , 
when she saw him suddenly spring to his feet, take in 
the whole situation at a glance, and, his drawing held 
high in the air in one hand, begin to make for the shore. 

Then he caught sight of Phoebe Elles, and his 
course deviated. She had not got very far from the 
bank, but she was in danger, and he was coming to 
her. The flood was very nearly on them both. Even 
in her agony, she noticed his slight pause of hesita- 
tion before he tossed the drawing he held recklessly 
on to the bank without looking after it, and the next 
moment his protecting arm was round her, and the 
flood swept partially over them. His other arm was 
round the bough of a tree that hung over the stream 
near where she was standing when he reached her. 
They were both overthrown by the rush of water, 
which passed over them, and then seemed to subside 
somewhat. She fainted, for the first time in her life. 



CHAPTER VII 

She was lying on her bed at the "Heather Bell," 
with only a very confused recollection of what had 
happened, and a bandaged foot that hurt dreadfully. 
A doctor had been sent for from Barnard Castle, so 
she was told, who had pronounced it only a slight 
sprain, but the skin of her leg was abraded from knee 
to instep, and that was the cause of the pain. She 
could not remember how it had happened there was 
a jagged bough, or a snag, she supposed, of the tree 
that Eivers had held on to, as the flood rushed past 
them, and which had caught her, somehow, as she 
slid down in his arms. She was a little light-headed 
still, and she kept calling out for the artist like a fret- 
ful child, and upbraiding him for refusing to come to 
her. Jane Anne, who was in and out of her room a 
great deal, treated these appeals sternly, and minis- 
tered to her with stony, condemnatory eyes, but Mrs. 
Watson's motherly heart was melted by her distress. 

"Just ye get yerself well, ma honey, and then ye'll 
see him! He's sore put out about ye, sure and that 
he is, and he's alway axing me how you's getting on. 
But ye must just keep yerself quiet!" 

Realizing that her only chance of seeing Rivers 
depended on her recovery, the restless woman put 

137 



138 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

great constraint upon herself, and in a couple of days, 
was well enough to be carried downstairs and laid on 
a horsehair sofa in the sitting-room. 

Her first day downstairs happened to be a hopelessly 
wet day, and the artist was perforce kept indoors, and 
painted all day at her side. He was busy, of course, 
but with extreme unselfishness he offered to read 
aloud to her. 

Tears of gratitude came into her eyes as she realised 
this. 

"I couldn't let you," she said, "but if you would 
let me talk to you a little, and go on painting the 
foreground, or some part that doesn't matter ?" 

He smiled, and turned so as to face her. "Don't 
let me get absorbed, then, and stray into the middle 
distance! I can't promise anything when I have got 
a brush in my hand." 

' ' Tell me all about the other day, ' ' she said. ' ' You 
saved my life!" 

"Which you very foolishly risked to save mine!" 
She was weak and he unconsciously spoke in the 
aggressively cheerful, indulgent tone one uses to an 
invalid. "I was very angry with you indeed for 
jumping in after me like that. A shout would have 
done." 

"I did call to you, but I could not make you hear." 

"Your voice must have been drowned by the rush- 
ing of the water. I knew that there was something 
wrong, though. I looked up from my drawing, and 
saw the water coming, and you a yard from the bank !" 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 139 

At the sound of the word drawing she gave a little 
scream she had quite forgotten it ! 

"I know I know the drawing! What became 
of the drawing?" 

"Well, you know, I had to have my hands free " 
he began, almost apologetically. 

"Of course! Forme! And now I remember see- 
ing you fling it away on to the bank. Was it" she 
spoke with bated breath, as one might speak of the 
fall of empires "was it quite spoiled?" 

"Pretty bad," he answered, moodily. 

"You can't think how I wish you had not saved me 
at its expense ! Why did you? Why did you?" she 
asked, with absolute sincerity. 

Eivers seemed to repent of his lapse into temper, 
slight as it had been. He said, laughingly, "Well, I 
must tell you that I thought it over ! It was a fear- 
ful wrench, of course, but I decided in your favour. 
Do you blame me?" 

She resented his not taking her seriously, and 
replied, gravely, "Yes, I do. I was not worth the 
drawing to you, I am sure. You should have con- 
sidered it first of all. Who was it was it Csesar 
who swam across the Channel with his Commentaries 
in his mouth?" 

"He did something of the kind but I never 
heard that he had a woman to look after as well." 

"And then you carried me home?" she went on, 
in a tone of sentimental reminiscence. 

"Yes," he replied, briskly. "One couldn't have 



140 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

got a carriage down there, and I could hardly have 
packed you into Farmer Ward's wheelbarrow!" 

"Did anyone see you carry me across the fields?" 

"Mrs. Popham did," he said, laughing at the recol- 
lection. "She even offered to help me! A woman 
who could hardly lift a fly!" 

"I must have looked awful!" Mrs. Elles pondered; 
she had often thought it over. "A wet woman is 
such an abject object! . . . And then you carried 
me up to bed?" 

"Yes. Mrs. Watson was very anxious to get her 
son, Jock, to do it but I thought of Jock and how 
he would have knocked your head against the banisters 
at every step, so I insisted on doing it myself. " 

"And then?" 

"And then the doctor came, and saw you, and saw 
me, and told me it was not much and then I was 
easier in my mind." 

"Then you were anxious about me?" 

"Very," he said. "Poor thing, you suffered so; 
and you were so good about it!" 

"Was I? I am glad." 

She then returned to the subject that was distress- 
ing her. "Are you sure you don't regret the draw- 
ing are not cross with me about it? Isn't it in that 
portfolio what remains of it? Show it me." 

"Oh, no, no!" he said, shuddering. 

But she had reached out for the portfolio that lay 
near her hand, and, with the wilfulness of illness, 
insisted on taking out the hopelessly blurred, grey- 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 141 

streaked sheet of paper stretched on a board. There 
was a hole in the paper, the size of a shilling, just 
where the sky-line met the cliff. It was utterly 
ruined, as the merest tyro in art must have realised. 

"Oh, poor, poor thing! A snag has caught it, too, 
like my leg," she moaned. 

Rivers dabbled furiously away in the glass of water 
with his fat brush. He was an artist and human. 

"I wish you would take it away!" he said, sulkily, 
without looking at it or her. 

"Where to?" asked Mrs. Elles, almost weeping. 

"Oh, anywhere to the devil, if you like." 

"I'll put it in my room, then," she said, calmly. 
"I shall like to have it as a memento." 

She slyly dropped it behind the sofa until she 
could carry it upstairs, and he did not seem even to 
notice what she was doing. 

The next day was very fine, and the artist had per- 
force to go out and paint as usual. Mrs. Elles felt 
unutterably solitary. She could not walk as far as 
Brignal, but she could not expect Rivers to stop at 
home and neglect his picture in order to amuse her. 
She virtuously stayed upstairs on one floor, as she was 
recommended to do, until evening, but she was too 
restless to sit or lie still, and wandered about from one 
room of the old inn to another. 

There were three bedrooms on the first story, hers 
and Rivers' and one unoccupied room whose floor was 
on a somewhat higher level than the others, up a tiny 



142 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

flight of stairs. She "changed the air," as Mrs. 
Watson put it, by sitting in there some part of the 
morning, and once an irresistible impulse led her 
into the artist's room, which was the most ascetic and 
the least comfortable of the three. 

She stayed a long while looking out of the window, 
gazing fondly at the view which must meet his eyes 
every morning as he lay in his bed. It was very 
nearly the same as that which met hers, naturally, 
since the two rooms adjoined. 

She noticed a chair, drawn between the dressing- 
table and the window. He sat there, she supposed, 
sometimes, and looked out. So would she. 

But she found herself looking in, not out. Her 
loving eyes gloated on all the details of his room ; the 
little heap of sketch books on the corner of the dress- 
ing-table ; the martyred pocket-handkerchief, stained 
all the colours of the rainbow, that he had used to 
dab his drawing with ; and the razors, that he kept 
so sharp, wherewith to scrape down its surface, lying 
beside those devoted to his own use ; the three mother 
o' pearl studs placed neatly on the ledge of the look- 
ing-glass, beside the heap of pence he had last turned 
out of his pockets ; the fair white china palettes that 
he made a point of washing out carefully with his own 
hands, and whereon it was now her adored occupation 
to "rub" the delicate proportions of each colour 
required during the day. All this curious intermix- 
ture of art materials and objects of personal use, so 
characteristic of the artist's room, struck her sense of 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 143 

dramatic incongruity and pleased her. Then she 
leaned out over the sill in a dream of what never 
could be, and forgot herself. Half an hour elapsed. 

A slight rustle behind her warned her of the pres- 
ence of Jane Anne, who, aggressively remarking, "I 
came to see to the blind," established herself there 
with a needle and cotton and drove Mrs. Elles away, 
although to uninitiated eyes the blind seemed in very 
good order. 

She went into her own room and spent the after- 
noon there ; she fell asleep, or she would have heard 
voices in the room below the sitting-room she shared 
with Rivers. 

A little, thin, consumptive -looking woman of fifty, 
in a homely utilitarian suit of tweeds which made her 
look like a schoolgirl, was interviewing Jane Anne on 
the subject of the harmonium's programme for next 
Sunday. She was the Vicar's wife, and, that subject 
concluded, the pair had moved across the hall and 
over the threshold of Rivers' sitting-room, the door of 
which stood carelessly open. 

"Out?" said Mrs. Popham, with an interrogatory 
gesture. "Both of them?" 

"He's out," answered Jane Anne. "She's 
upstairs!" 

"Now, who and what is she?" asked the other, in 
the tone of decent curiosity. "I asked your aunt, 
but she says she knows nothing, and doesn't care." 

"Aunt's fulish!" 

"I told her she'd care fast enough if her inn were 



144 THE HUMAN INTEREST 



to lose its character, as it's in a very fine way to do 
with all this. Mr. Popham and I have been talking 
about it only to-day. Everybody is talking about it!" 
Mrs. Popham spoke as if Eokeby were a centre of 
civilization. "Several people saw Mr. Rivers carry- 
ing her back across the fields, the day of her acci- 
dent, and we all wonder .what her relationship to 
him can be! Frick is a foreign name. Is she a 
foreigner?" 

"Nay, she's right English?" Jane Anne replied, 
with conviction, forgetting, in her excitement, to 
mince her words as usual. "And Frick is not her 
name, neither!" 

"How do you know that? Then I am right and 
my husband is wrong. He is for taking the most 
charitable view of her, as indeed he does of every- 
one but I told him that I was perfectly convinced, 
in my own mind, that the woman is an adventuress 
of the most disreputable kind! Everything proves 
it!" 

"Can you tell me what is meant precisely by an 
adventuress, Ma'am?" her favourite Sunday-school 
teacher enquired, pedantically. 

"People mean by an adventuress," Mrs. Popham 
replied, "an unclassed creature, a person with no 
visible means of subsistence or regular occupation. 
They go about the country seeing whom they can 
make fools of. There are plenty of them about, I 
am told. Russian spies, some of them, who worm 
themselves into families as governesses, and so on, in 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 145 

order to surprise secrets. What this one can possibly 
want with Mr. Rivers, I can't tell, but no good, I am 
sure!" 

"Him to marry her!" said Jane Anne sombrely, as 
one who had thought out thoroughly all the tragic 
issues of the case. 

"It is possible," said Mrs. Popham, "and he is so 
good, so trusting, that anybody could take him in 
who set herself to do it, as this creature is probably 
doing. I can't tell you how it distresses me that 
such a nice man should be made a prey of ! It must 
really be put a stop to, Jane Anne!" 

"Yes, Ma'am," eagerly agreed Jane, forgetting to 
be dignified. Whether Mrs. Elles should prove to be 
a Russian spy or not, the important thing was to 
separate her from Mr. Rivers. "She isn't fit for 
him. I can't abide her myself. I mistrusted her 
from the very first time I set eyes on her. Nasty 
painted thing! She's only got two dresses to her 
back, and yet she wears rings worth I don't know 
how much! Great big stones. She sings foreign 
songs to him, of an evening, in all sorts of queer lan- 
guages on my piano ! He niver speaks a word to me 
now that she's come ! He used to say a kind word 
now and then. She was out with him in the Park, 
one night lately, till I don't know what hour. It's 
not decent ! I was waiting at my window and I saw 
through a chink in the trees I can see all down the 
Broad Walk, if I have a mind. I waited long enough, 
and I saw thern come back down the walk together, 



146 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

and the moon was shining full on them, and I 
saw " She hesitated. 

"Was he? Was she ?" Mrs. Popham asked, with 
timid, scared eagerness. 

"They were walking hand in hand," said Jane 
Anne, shyly, "and if that's not being lovers, I 
don't know what is!" 

Her face relaxed, and she burst into tears. 

"Don't, Jane Anne, don't go on like that ! Per- 
haps they are engaged. My husband says so," said 
Mrs. Popham, assuming that the staid girl's tears 
proceeded from her sense of outraged morality. 
"But still, it is a very odd way to behave. They 
ought to get married, that's all I can say!" 

"Oh, ma'am, Mr. Rivers and a woman like that, 
with her painted cheeks and her hair well, I 
shouldn't like to have to swear that it is even her 
own! She's not respectable, even if she is engaged 
to him. I could tell you things and so could 
Dorothy, who waits on them!" 

"Sh-h!" said the Vicar's wife. "But we must get 
her away from him, somehow, Jane Anne." 

"Oh, Ma'am, if we only could! Dear Mr. Rivers! 
I'd do anything I could. Only, she can't walk now. " 

"If she is what we think her, that sprain of hers 
may be just a ruse. It probably is. I can bring 
myself to believe anything of a woman who masquer- 
ades under an assumed name. How do you know, by 
the way, that it is so?" 

Jane Anne went into Rivers' room with the air of 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 147 

one performing a religious rite, and fetched an 
umbrella out of the corner and handed it solemnly to 
the Vicar's wife. 

"That is hers! "she said. 

Mrs. Popham held it up to the light and read in 
characters half effaced by time, not by prudence the 
letters "P. E. " on its battered, silver handle, and, 
furthermore, the address, 59 Saville Place, Newcastle. 

"E. doesn't spell Frick!"said the Board School 
girl, proudly. 

"I don't quite like doing it," murmured the 
Vicar's wife. "But really I can't let this goon! 
It can do her no harm if she is respectable, and if she 
isn't ? One must think of Mr. Rivers ! Read out 
that address again, Jane Anne." 

Jane Anne looked quite animated as she did so, and 
Mrs. Popham wrote it down in a note-book. 

"Now, put the umbrella back!" that lady added, 
in rather a shame-faced way, "and leave it all to me. 
And, Jane Anne, mind you practise up that thing of 
Arcadelt's in time for Divine service; you seemed 
rather weak in it last Sunday, or perhaps you were 
not attending? I saw her in church. She probably 
gets Mr. Rivers to take her there to throw a little 
dust in all our eyes. I notice she never kneels or 
sings. It is evidently the first time she has ever been 
regularly to church in her life!" 



CHAPTER VIII 

Two days after this incident, of which she naturally 
remained unaware, Mrs. Elles was well enough to 
walk across three fields to meet the artist on his way 
back from his work. She exulted in the fact that 
she had become so countrified as to disdain to put on 
a hat even, and her red-golden hair, less elaborately 
arranged than it used to be, shone beautifully in the 
slanting light of the setting sun. 

She waved her hand to him as he came in sight, 
crying, in accents of frank camaraderie: "Have you 
had a good day?" 

"Not at all!" 

"He's cross," she thought, and as he answered her 
so curtly, and moreover stared at her in an oddly 
unconscious way, as if he were taking her in for the 
first time, she felt all her joyous welcome frozen on 
her lips and at once jumped to the conclusion that 
somebody had been abusing her to him. 

"You look at me as if you didn't know me or like 
me!" she said, undiplomatically, because she felt it 
so acutely. 

"And as I happen to do both " He spoke 

quite roughly between his teeth the justification she 
forced upon him. He re-adjusted the sketching bag 

148 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 149 

on his shoulders with a hasty impatient movement. 
The bag was heavy, and it had been a very hot day. 

"Did any tiresome tourists come and overlook you?" 
she asked presently. She knew how he hated being 
overlooked, and even here in these wilds, periodical 
intrusions of the outer barbarian were possible. An 
encounter with an 'Arry of Leeds or Scarborough 
would account for any amount of ill-temper. 

"The Vicar came and spoke to me," he answered 
her grudgingly. 

"Ah! Like old times," she said. "It was I who 
frightened him away. Ever since the Vicaress saw 
you carry me home, I think she has disapproved of us 
both. She never came to call on me, as you said she 
would. I don't want her to, I am sure, I could not 
return a formal call in a sailor hat, and that is all I 
have got. ... Do you mind not walking quite so 
fast? It hurts my foot." 

"I beg your pardon!" he said. "I keep forgetting 
you are an invalid still. It is most unfortunate!" 

Again she noticed the accents of irritation and 
wondered at them. He had always been so nice about 
her accident till now. 

"It will be all right if we go on gently like this," 
she said with intent to soothe. "In a few days I 
shan't mind what I do. We can go one of our nice 
long Sunday walks again." He made a movement. 
"They are the greatest pleasure I have in the world 
even when it thunders and lightens. ... By the way, 
I have some news for you bad news. There is a 



150 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

new arrival at the hotel. I heard the noise of instal- 
lation." 

"The deuce there is!" he said, the current of his 
thoughts, whatever they were, entirely changed in a 
moment by news so stirring. "A man or a woman?" 

"A man, I think. His boots made such a noise, 
stamping over my head." 

"One of those wretched touring bicyclists probably. 
He will perhaps only stop the night. Any luggage?" 

"I saw none. That rather helps the bicyclist 
theory. But then, I saw no bicycle. Oh! I do 
hope, though, that it is all right. We don't want 
anyone else here, do we?" 

She came a little nearer to him, unconsciously, as 
she spoke. "We" she enjoyed using the pronoun. 
Together they walked down the espalier -bordered path 
of the inn garden ; and, as they turned in under the 
porch, she raised her arm and broke off a rose and put 
it, somewhat obtrusively, and a little against his will 
perhaps, into the artist's button-hole. 

It was all done in the sight of Jane Anne, who 
came rushing downstairs from the upper rooms as 
they entered, looking, somehow, very busy and 
excited. It was Jane Anne, not Dorothy, who for 
some reason or other brought in the lamp to them 
that evening, setting it down heavily, so heavily that 
Mrs. Elles, looking up, saw that the girl's hands 
were trembling with nervousness. 

But through some unaccountable swing of the 
mental pendulum Phoebe Ellea was to-night so nearly 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 151 

absolutely happy that she did not waste a thought on 
the causes of the young woman's excitement, or that 
other problem, the possible duration of the mysteri- 
ous visitor's stay. Tourists might and would come 
and go, she and Bivers were there it might be for ever. 
For ever! Yes, she felt to-night as if that might 
really be, and life remain for ever a fairy tale. The 
prince was here, in the enchanted castle, in willing 
bonds to the enchanted princess, and so far, no 
dragons or other princesses contested him with her. 

She sat in the low window seat and leaned back 
against the sill, her hands idly clasped behind her 
head, and closed her eyes now and then, and felt so 
happy that she smiled without knowing it. She had 
bidden truce to her eternal self-consciousness for 
once. 

Eivers looked up now and then, but there was no 
apprehension in his eyes. He did not see her he 
was in another world a world where neither Phoebe 
Elles, nor any other woman, could follow him. That 
could not be helped, but meantime his physical pres- 
ence sufficed the woman who adored him. Her tense 
nerve fibres were momentarily relaxed , she was soothed 
and lulled into a state of happy acquiescence in the 
present order of things. It had been very hot all this 
An gust 'day, but now the cool airs of evening were 
just beginning to qualify the dry heat that had been 
so intense as to blister the window shutters, and make 
the air seem to dance on the distant skyline of the 
moors. Mrs. Elles was very lightly dressed, her thin 



152 THE HUMAN INTEEEST 

muslin shirt showed the rosy skin of her shoulder that 
rested against the jamb of the window frame, half in, 
half out. She deliberately inhaled the sweet aro- 
matic smell of the jessamine and the phloxes that grew 
under the window, and the mild breath of the cows 
that leaned over the fence. There were people in the 
garden, she could hear then* whispering voices. 

"Lovers probably," she thought "the landlady's 
sons courting then* lasses. How sweet it all is!" 

After half an hour's steady work, the painter 
became restless. Perhaps he remembered the advent 
of the presumed cyclist, and if he did, it worried 
him. He seemed to be listening once or twice to 
vague sounds heard in the passage outside, then he 
began to walk about. Once he brought up sharply in 
his walk in front of the stack of umbrellas and travel- 
ling gear in the corner of the room, and stood there. 
She happened to be looking out into the garden just 
then, or she would have thought this terribly omi- 
nous, and all her peace of mind would have been de- 
stroyed. When he came back to the table, he looked 
at the drawing and shook his head. That gesture 
escaped her too. Then he left the room and she saw 
him stroll deviously up the garden and look over the 
gate into the fields. When he came back, she had 
not moved or in any way modified the picture of rest- 
ful contentment she presented. He looked at her a 
puzzled look then he said : 

"I have seen the new lodger!" he said. "At least 
I think it was she!" 



THE HUMAN INTEEEST 153 

"You have? A woman?" 

"Ye8, a tall, handsome personage, dressed all in 
forbidding and ponderous black. She was sitting in 
the arbour out there, talking to Jane Anne in a very 
friendly way." 

"It was the girl's own mother, probably. Every 
girl of her class has got a bombazine mother that she 
produces on occasion." 

"Jane Anne is an orphan. Besides this was more 
than bombazine it was it was something very 
handsome, if I know anything about it which I 
don't!" 

"No, there's no black in nature!" said Mrs. Elles, 
smiling fondly at him, "And I should not expect 
you to know much about women's dress. My er 
father knows there are such things as ruches and 
pipings, and that is all." 

"I do happen to know that there is such a thing as 
jet, and that it is very expensive. A sort of glittering 
coat of mail, you know, that women wear." 

"Egidia does!" cried Mrs. Elles, with a sudden 
little pang of jealousy. "She wore one in Newcastle, 
I remember, when I went to see her. Sequins!" 

"Yes, the 'bombazine mother' wore little shining 
things like hers," he replied, with a disconcerting 
apprehension of the intricacies of feminine apparel in 
Miss Giles's case which disclosed to the woman at his 

N 

side the parlous state of her own heart, if indeed she 
had been under any doubt about it. 

He went on, "As for this wretched woman, I do 



154 THE HUMAN INTEREST 



hope we shall not come across her ! Her voice was 
enough for me. I wonder how a woman with a 
strident unsympathetic voice like that can find anyone 
to live with her. I could not be in her company an 
hour." 

"I daresay she is somebody's mother-in-law," 
remarked Mrs. Elles, with pathos. 

" And eyes like gimlets! She had a good look at 
me!" 

"And now she is most probably pumping them 
about you, and me, and who and what we are!" 

"Probably," he replied rather grimly, and sat down 
in front of his drawing, and began to work at it with 
all the signs of intense concentration. 

She stayed where she was, in the window seat, and 
watched him, with an ardent, timidly devouring gaze. 
This time, he was too much absorbed to look up, so it 
was quite safe. 

She found herself wondering how a man could live 
in such an atmosphere of passionate regard, and not 
know it. It seemed to her that the cloud, as it were, 
of devotion and admiration with which she enwrapped 
him, was so intensely actual a positive physical fact, 
it seemed to her that she could see the halo with 
which she crowned him. 

For literally half-an-hour she heard nothing but the 
intermittent plip-plop of the brush in the glass of 
water, fast growing muddy coloured. He seemed to 
her to dash the brush into it with more energy nay 
virulence than usual. 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 155 

She presently observed aloud, with the sweet imper- 
tinence permitted by intimacy: "How you are dash- 
ing it in ! I call that the splash and carry one of art, 
but I suppose it will all come out right in the end." 

"Or all wrong," he said and his voice was so 
changed that she looked up in surprise. "The 
chances are that I shall never finish it. I am think- 
ing of leaving this place to-morrow!" 

"What?" she screamed, rather than said; and her 
voice from excess of emotion was shrill and strident 
enough to apprise even one so absorbed as Rivers that 
his intelligence was of no ordinary degree of impor- 
tance to his listener. 

She had known all along that this must come and 
she had made up her mind how she would behave 
when it came but not so suddenly, good God ! Her 
resolution deserted her and her voice betrayed her. 

The painter deliberately laid down his brush, and 
came to where she was sitting in the window-seat, 
and taking her two unresisting hands, led her a few 
paces into the room. 

"There are people in the garden," he said quietly. 
He screwed up his eyes, and looked at her exactly as 
if she were a "subject," and a difficult one, as she 
thought afterwards. 

"Now, please listen to me," he went on, with a little 
gentle pressure of the hands pushing her into a seat. 
"I have been thinking " 

"Oh, dear!" she murmured, like a spoilt child. 
She was so acutely conscious that any reflection on his 



156 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

part was likely to mean a conclusion inimical to her 
peace. The moment he thought about it, he would 
be sure to see how wrong and impossible the whole 
situation was. 

"I am a careless fellow," Rivers proceeded to say, 
"and my head is generally full of my own work, to 
the exclusion of everything else. ... I can't say I 
ever thought about it, but I have heard something 
to-day Mr. Popham made an absurd suggestion to 
me which shows me that I am very stupidly com- 
promising you by my presence here." 

Mrs. Elles interrupted him with vehemence, stung 
by his generosity in putting it so. 

"Indeed no, it is I who am the interloper! I is I 
who ought to go and I will!" She drew herself up 
proudly. "You to go! Why, your picture isn't any- 
thing like finished." 

"The picture is a minor matter, compared with " 

"It is quite the most important thing in the 
world," she rejoined, with a little touch of irony, 
bitterly aware that to him it was so, indeed. Then 
her spirit oozed away, and she said, weakly, "No, 
no, it is for me to go, of course but, oh. we were so 
happy ! Why must you make me ' ' 

"I don't make you go of course not!" he said 
irritably. "I intend to go myself. Did I not say so?" 

"Nonsense," she answered, quite rudely, in her 
extreme anguish. "That would be no good at all. 
Besides, do you suppose I should care to be here at 
all unless you were?" 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 157 

She uttered the crude fact recklessly, imperiously, 
contemptuously almost. Surely he must see ; she had 
nothing to conceal from him now ! She hid her face 
in her hands a moment after, and tried to leave the 
room, but Rivers caught her to him as she passed. 

"Then, for God's sake, don't go!" he said, tearing 
her hands down from her face. With one quick look 
at him as he sat across the chair holding her body, she 
flnng her arms round his neck, and returned his 
embrace with all the passion and abandonment of one 
doomed. Married to one man and beloved of another, 
she felt herself to be so. A look in Rivers' eyes had 
warned her that Alastor's asceticism was only skin 
deep; a mysterious, material rapport was established 
between them. She felt as if she had known him all 
her life. 

"It is all right, then, if you care for me," he said, 
in a matter-of-fact voice. "What do you suppose it 
was that Mr. Popham wanted to-day? He wanted to 
marry us, by way of looking after the morals of his 
parish ! ' ' 

He laughed; he was gay. Even she had never 
dreamed that he could be so charming ! She removed 
herself a few paces away from him, and stood, sobbing 
convulsively. 

"Oh, forgive me, forgive me!" she repeated. 

He became grave and stern in a moment, struck by 
the utter conviction in her tone. 

"What for? Because you don't care for me? Why 
should you? I have made a mistake, that's all!" 



158 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

He turned away impatiently, possessed for the 
moment by the mere surface irritation of the man 
who has been refused. 

"No, no, not that! Oh, I adore you!" 

She laid frantic hold on the lapel of hia coat. He 
covered her hand with his. 

"What then? How nervous you are! What can 
it be?" 

He laughed. 

"You are not going to tell me that you are married 
already, I suppose?" 

"Yes, yes, that's just it. I am!" 

There was a pause. Then 

"I said it in joke. Do you mean to say that you 
are not joking?" 

"No, no, I wish I were. I have deceived you 
shamefully." 

He stared at her, then he sat down heavily on the 
chair by the table in front of his work. He looked a 
little bewildered and very angry. 

"Shall I tell you all?" 

"Oh, yes, if you care to not that it concerns me 
now." 

He idly picked up his brush, charged with colour 
as it was, and let it fall full on the drawing in front 
of him. 

She caught his hands. 

'Oh, don't, don't spoil your drawing because of 
me! And listen to me, for it does concern you, since 
I love you, and you Bay that you love me. I must 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 159 

tell you, I must explain what I have done. Oh, 
don't look at me so ! You were my lover a moment 
ago, and now you are my judge." 

"A woman has no right to let a man " 

"No, I know she hasn't. I ought not to have let 
you tell me that you cared for me. But I am so glad 
you did! It will be something to remember after- 
wards. I must tell you my story my true story! I 
told you once, you remember, the story of Phoebe 
Elles the woman who left her husband, because he 
was so unkind to her " 

"Oh, so that is your story, is it? And the one you 
told me about yourself your pretended self " 

"That I invented. I had to tell you something 
He rose from his chair. She went on "Oh, 



forgive me, forgive me! I have not told you the 

truth " 

"So it seems! "he replied, coldly, opening the door, 
and going out. "Good-night." 

She was left alone, with the worst of all scourges 
that a woman may have to suffer, that of reading in 
the eyes of the man she loves the expression of the 
scorn, deserved or undeserved, that he bears her. 

For a long time she sat there, in this little narrow 
room that had framed all her brief happiness, half 
stunned by the judgment that had been passed on 
her, and also by the shock of self-revelation that 
went with it. She felt mean, as well as miserable. 



160 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

The noises about the house ceased gradually there 
was no sound of footsteps overhead, yet she had heard 
Elvers go to his room and close the door. He was 
probably sitting brooding by the window in that 
chair she had sat in. He had omitted to put his 
drawing away, presently she rose and tenderly put 
a sheet of tissue paper over it, as she had seen him 
do sometimes, when called away even for a moment. 
Then she sat down again. Her eyes fell on a Brad- 
shaw on the mantelpiece; she thought of getting it 
and looking out a train to go home by to-morrow. 
She had no longer any thought of committing suicide, 
the idea of expiation of which she was now possessed 
did not admit of any selfish solution of that sort. 
But she had never yet been able to find out anything 
in Bradshaw for herself ; she would have to ask Mr. 
Rivers. 

That she must not do ; on the contrary, she must 
never see him again! She must arrange to breakfast 
in her own room to-morrow, wait till he went out to 
his work, and leave Greta Bridge without even 
attempting to bid him good-bye ! 

The lamp began to gurgle, and she realised that the 
oil in it was getting so low that it would be out in a 
few minutes. She would be left alone in the dark! 
She was afraid of the dark like a child. The window 
was still wide open to the night, she could tell by the 
cool wind blowing in on her and chilling her through 
her thin blouse. Suppose, too, that the Spirit of the 
Greta, evolved in happier days by Rivers' imagination, 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 161 

should suddenly appear, framed in the black square! 
She was indeed haunted by the vision of a face seen 
there during her recent interview with him ; it had 
impressed itself somehow on her consciousness, though 
she was too much excited to take cognizance of it at 
the time, but now the impression returned to her 
with extraordinary vividness, as of a real person who 
had been there ! 

She started to her feet in terror, and made for the 
door. 

She ran upstairs all in one breath, as it were, and 
then paused, by the door of his room, panting a little. 
She gently proceeded to run her fingers down its 
uncommunicable surface. Behind those boards was 
the man she loved, and who despised her. 

But he had said he loved her, before he had found 
out that she was a liar. Nothing could take that 
away. 

She crouched down by the door, forgetful of every 
consideration of prudence. She was a chidden child, 
that longed to sue childishly for pardon. 

Yes, she was a liar, a criminal! 

She had almost tamely accepted his view in the first 
instance, because it was his view, it was his contempt 
that had made her feel contemptible. But now her 
eyes the eyes of her spirit were opened, and she even 
exaggerated the heinousness of her crime, the black- 
ness of her own soul, till she felt herself absolutely 
shrink from her own carefully cherished and pam- 
pered personality. She saw herself morally naked and 



162 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

unpicturesque. All her little ingeniously disposed 
veils of sophistry and plausibility she tore rudely 
away. She took a quite savage joy in shattering her 
own elaborate life-system of pose. The truth, she 
sadly, tragically perceived, was not in her it never 
had been, and again she blamed her mother's train- 
ing, and Truth was everything. 

No sound came from the room within. Had she 
but known it, the artist had flung himself on the bed 
in his clothes as he was, and had fallen asleep, the 
heavy complete sleep of a man whose lungs have been 
breathing in the fresh outside air all day, under cir- 
cumstances of intense creative excitement. Even 
now, Art came first. 

The door of room number three, a few steps along 
the passage, opened and closed again. It was the 
room necessarily occupied by the unknown lodger. 
Mrs. Elles was too much absorbed either to hear or 
notice. Her thought, like the thought of a hypnotic 
subject, was concentrated on the yellow brass handle 
of the door against which she crouched, which mes- 
merized her, in its shining immutability. In about 
half an hour, she made an effort to shake off the 
lethargy which had taken possession of her, and walk- 
ing away, like a somnambulist, her hand to her head, 
and stumbling over her gown, regained her own 
room. 



CHAPTEK IX 

She cried a great deal and she slept a little. She 
would have died sooner than own it, but luckily for 
her newly developed sense of veracity, there was no 
one to question her on this point. About eight 
o'clock in the morning she rose and dressed, resolved 
to go downstairs to breakfast as usual. She found it 
practically impossible not to see Eivers again. If he 
wished to avoid her, he easily could do so. 

So at the usual hour, she drifted into the little 
sitting-room, her face composed to a certain extent, 
but her eyelids swelled, and her cheeks bleached and 
seared by a sufficient percentage of the hours of the 
night devoted to weeping. 

The man of her thoughts was sitting at the break- 
fast table, bending studiously over a Bradshaw. He 
hardly looked up, but he muttered something civil. 
Mrs. Elles was woman of the world enough to be able 
to murmur her conventional "Good morning" in 
return, for the benefit of Dorothy, who was in attend- 
ance, and who watched them both so intently as to 
justify Mrs. Elles' peevish remark, "I do wish 
Dorothy would not stare so." 

"Does she? I have not noticed," he replied, list- 
lessly. "Would you mind pouring out the tea?" 

163 



164 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

This commonplace suggestion brought her back 
from the verge of hysterics, as it was perhaps intended 
to do. 

"Oh, I forgot," she exclaimed, taking her hands 
ont of her lap, and becoming suddenly and ineffi- 
ciently active. Elvers never got a worse cup of tea in 
his life, probably, than the one Mrs. Elles gave him 
that morning, and he took it without sugar, comment, 
or complaint. 

They ate and drank in silence. Mrs. Elles could 
bear anything but that. 

"Will you look out a train for me a train home?" 
she asked, in tones as nearly devoid of all emotion as 
she could compass. 

"I will, if you will tell me where you live!" ha 
replied, with equal coldness. 

"Newcastle," she murmured, in a voice choked 
with incipient sobs. 

"He opened the Guide with cruelly assured hands. 
"There is a train at 12:45," he said, looking up. 

But the strain had been too much for her, she had 
flung down her napkin, and had risen from the table, 
and hurrying across the room to the sofa, had flung 
herself down there in a heap, with her face to the 
wall. He caught the white gleam of a pocket 
handkerchief, which alone told him she was 
weeping. 

There was a silence. Eivers groaned the nervous 
groan of a man who is too well bred to swear at a 
woman. 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 165 

She tried to refrain from sobbing aloud. She lay 
quite still. Her eyes, half open in the dim penumbra 
of the sofa corner, saw only, as in a nightmare, its 
rough horse-hair surface, like a dreary hill, studded 
with briars of incommensurate proportions, and over 
which she somehow imagined herself climbing. Her 
ears, preposterously sharpened by her excitement, 
next heard the faint click of a teacup, hastily pushed 
aside. A panic fear overcame her, lest thia should be 
the signal of his rising, and that the clash of the door 
closing behind him, as she had heard it last night, 
and remembered it, would be the next sound that 
would come to her ears. But as in some stages of 
the mesmeric trance, she was powerless to stop him; 
she would not be able to raise a finger even to save her 
life, and her life it would be that she would lose. He 
would go out of the room out of her world for ever ! 
She listened . . . her ears were tingling ... it was 
positive pain. . . . 

He did rise and she presently felt his hand on 
her shoulder, and heard strange, unexpected words of 
tenderness from his lips. 

"Dear I love you but what can I do? You are 
another man's wife." 

She turned her whole body round, and caught his 
arm to her, and hid her face on his sleeve. 

"Yes, I know, but can you ever forgive me for 
the lies I have told you? That is what I want to 
know." 

"I have said that I loved you," he said, simply. 



166 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

"I can't say more than that. Women are different, I 
suppose." 

She never remembered anything sadder than the 
sigh with which he said this. She realized that in 
order to exonerate the woman he said he cared for, 
and to condone her fault, he had been obliged to 
involve the whole of her sex in her disgrace, and to 
set all womankind a few degrees lower. 

"What am I to do then?" she asked like a child, 
sitting up, and pushing the disordered hah- off her 
brows without regard to order or becomingness. 

"Obviously," he said, and his tone was almost 
brutal, "go, unless you will let me? Only, as you 
have a home and a husband to go to " 

"You might have spared me that!" she said, with 
a flash of her old spirit, rising, and wandering devi- 
ously towards the door, like one in a sad and hopeless 
dream. "Of course I must go!" she said meekly, 
fumbling with the door handle. "Will you please 
open it? I have things to do . . . give up my room 
. . . pay my bill. ..." 

"Have you are you sure you have enough money?" 

"No, I daresay not," she answered with dreary 
inconsequence. "But it doesn't matter!" 

"What nonsense ! Of course it matters. You must 
let me lend you some." 

She shuddered. "Oh, I couldn't borrow of yon." 

"Why not? You don't know what you are saving, 
poor thing!" 

At that word she began to cry. 



THE HUMAN INTEEEST 167 

"Look here " His words were rough, but his 

voice was gentle. "For Heaven's sake, don't go and 
expose yourself expose us" for she had made a ges- 
ture expressive of entire disregard of all malign infer- 
ences with regard to herself ' 'to the whole household ! 
It is bad enough already!" 

He took her hand, and she ceased to weep, and 
looked up into the face of her supreme arbiter with a 
dull submission. 

"You must take these three notes that I am going 
to give you," he said authoritatively, "and go quietly 
up to your room and ring for the servant and ask for 
your bill and pay it I can't do all this for you, or I 
would but I will order the trap to take you to the 
station in time for the 12 :45 !" 

"Drive to the station with me," she murmured. 

"No, I must not do that, but I will tell you what I 
will do. As soon as you have made all your arrange- 
ments, we will take a little walk in the Park, shall 
we?" 

He spoke like an ascetic, dealing himself out many 
penances, and but one indulgence. His tone through- 
out was businesslike and decided, he was no longer 
the quiet indifferent dreamer of dreams, but the 
efficient man of the world, the man of action ; and 
the fanciful hysterical woman at his side was com- 
pletely dominated by his decision, and stilled for the 
moment into something like acquiescence with her 
fate. 

She carried out all his directions faithfully and 



168 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

accurately, and in less than half an hour, joined him 
in the road outside the inn, veiled and spectacled, 
and demure as a nun about to take the vow ! 

"I have told them," he said, "to bring the trap 
round to the Park Gates to meet you. So you will 
not need to go back to the inn at all. We have just 
half an hour." 

"But you are wasting your whole morning's work," 
she said as they turned in at the Park Gates. It was 
the first thing that occurred to her to say. 

"Oh, just for once!" he replied. "My work will 
have no cause to complain of me after to-day. " 

She shuddered at the grimness of his accent she 
apprehended his meaning only too well. She seemed 
to see him in her mind's eye, as he would be hence- 
forth, stooping, brooding, gloating over his work in 
the dell of Brignal, alone, as he was before she came 
there, and mildly, dully happy perhaps, as he may 
have been, before the Human Interest came to trouble 
him. 

And yet "He does not want to let me see how 
he feels it," was the secret consolation that lay all the 
while at the back of her thought, explaining his 
brusqueness, his taciturnity, his hardness, which her 
surface mind could not help resenting and deprecat- 
ing. Her soul's life, which was then at its lowest ebb, 
lived on that thought, and her body took courage 
from it. 

She walked into the Park almost briskly by his 
side, and when they had travelled a certain distance 



THE HUMAN INTEKEST 169 

along the broad path, he made a significant move- 
ment of hia hand towards her spectacles. 

"Can you take those things off?" he asked her, 
imperiously. 

She obediently doffed the symbol of her martyrdom 
and return to the paths of virtue, and handed them 
to him. He folded the spectacles and put them in 
his coat pocket. 

"The bill was only thirteen pounds," she next 
remarked, holding out the notes he had lent her. 
"I had plenty of money of my own, so I return 
these." 

The notes, too, he put into his pocket without com- 
ment. Then she said reproachfully : 

"Don't you want to know my name?" 

He started. "Your name? That does not matter, 
does it?" 

"But you surely must know my name to write to 
me by?" 

"I am not going to write to you." 

"Why not?" There was a sharp note of prescient 
anguish in her voice. 

"I am not good at writing letters." 

"Ah, no, it isn't that," she answered sadly. "You 
mean of course that you want to go quite out of my 
life." 

"What can I do?" 

"Do!" she repeated after him vaguely. Then 
"Must you?" 
"Yes I must." 



170 THE HUMAN INTEKEST 

"But it isn't possible, no, it isn't possible!" she 
cried. 

"Quite possible," he answered her doggedly. "I 
did not know you a month ago I shall not know you 
a month hence, that's all!" 

She wailed out gently, like a child. "But what 
am I to do? What are you going to do?" 

"I am going to do my work," he answered her 
severely and coldly. "My work, that I have been 
letting go to the dogs lately. I shall paint and 
paint like the very devil as I did before you came. 
You must do that too. Work is the only thing, I 
find." 

"Work, work, honest work!" she repeated mechan- 
ically. "But will you tell me what work I have to 
do? It is all very well for you you speak as if you 
quite looked forward to your life without me but I 
shall eat my heart out." 

"Oh, people say that, but there is a certain savage 
pleasure in renunciation, as you will find." 

His tone was so extraordinarily bitter, that she cried 
out joyfully, "Oh, then you do care a little? You 
speak of renunciation! Then I can speak. I was 
afraid to. I was beginning to think that you had 
only oh, how difficult it is to say these things ! that 
you had only proposed to me, because I had com- 
promised myself by staying here with you so long. 
Out of pity, you know!" 

They had left the Broad Walk, and were wandering 
down a track in the undergrowth. He turned round 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 171 

to her, and his voice was quite different from the one 
he had been hitherto using. 

"You are quite wrong if you think that. On the 

contrary " He stopped, and seemed embarrassed 

for the first time. "It was what I wanted I said 
that I loved you and I did. I do only " 

"Then then if you can say that " She 

seized his hand, raised it to her lips, and kissed it. 
"Then let him let my husband divorce me! I must 
aay it! I can't let myself drown without a word! 
Mortimer will have every excuse to divorce me, 
don't you see? I have been living practically alone 
with you for a whole month ! It looks bad enough 
even old Mr. Popham saw it. I could not defend it 
and I won't ! Mortimer will have to divorce me, 
and we will marry each other and be happy. . . . 
Why do you shake your head like that? No ! But 
why not? You think my proposal dreadful ! So it 
is, but I would do anything anything in the world 
to come to you." 

"And so would I for you you must not doubt 
that!" he replied, and his slow deliberate tones in no 
wise expressed the emotion that, for her comfort, she 
could see in his eyes. He gave her back her hands, 
as it were. 

"Anything," he repeated gravely, "but a dis- 
honourable thing! No, not even for you! . . . 
Look here ! it is now half past eleven you can only 
just do it! The trap will be there already! You 
shall leave me here. Please don't make diffi- 



172 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

culties, my dear. It has to be. We have decided it, 
haven't we? Good-bye . . . good-bye!" 

She did not cry. She stood still and leant her head 
against the trunk of a huge beech tree, and felt her 
hair catch in its rough bark, and half closed her eyes 
in anticipation of a parting that would be worse to 
bear than a blow. Would he kiss her? He must, 
and yet she would not ask him. 

He did; he took her in his arms, and gratified her 
great love with a kiss more perfunctory than passion- 
ate, perhaps, and which yet awakened the woman's 
heart in her body once and for all. Then he turned 
sharply on his heel and raised his hat she smiled 
even in her misery at the irony of it, but she under- 
stood him now and left her. 

She dared not watch him go, lest she fall into the 
crime of calling him back to her. He might hate her 
for that. She looked up into the branches of the 
tree overhead, till a sudden rush of tears mercifully 
blinded her ! 

Ten minutes later, she made her way down the 
Broad Walk to the Gate, turning a foolish unintelli- 
gent stare on the porter who opened it for her as 
he had done for Rivers ten minutes before she felt a 
wild desire to ask him how her lover had looked as 
he passed through. Still in a merciful dream she 
mounted the steps of the dog-cart that was waiting in 
the road for her, and was whirled away in the direc- 
tion of Barnard Castle. 

She was wrong in her supposition Rivers had not 



THE HUMAN INTEEEST 173 

left the Park, but had turned down a little side path 
to the right. He stayed in the Park till he heard the 
sound of the wheels of the dog-cart going past the 
high boundary wall. Then he walked with his quick 
elastic step to the gate, and back to the "Heather Bell. " 

"I wonder if I shall ever paint another decent pic- 
ture?" was the purely technical remark that he made 
to himself. He was very pale, and he lifted his hat 
off, once or twice, and breathed deeply as the cold 
morning air met his forehead. 

"A lady to see you, Mr. Eivers," said Jane Anne to 
him, as he crossed the porch. 

"Where?" 

"She asked to be shown into your sitting-room, 
Sir," answered Jane Anne, with great suavity of 
manner. 

"You should not have done that!" the painter said 
wearily, and passed in. 

The first thing that caught his eyes on entering the 
little parlour that he had shared with Mrs. Elles was 
her tear-stained handkerchief lying like a white blot 
on the black horsehair sofa, and her long tan- coloured 
gloves spread at length upon the table. If he had 
thought about it, he would have recollected that the 
gloves had not lain there when he left the room, or at 
any rate, were not in the same position. In the very 
middle of the room stood a tall commanding presence, 
the "Bombazine Mother" as Mrs. Elles had insisted 
on calling her the lady he had seen talking to Jane 
Anne in the garden last night ! 



174 THE HUMAN INTEBEST 

One bony hand was firmly planted on the table in 
the neighbourhood of the gloves, the other flourished 
a letter in an aggressively judicial manner. The 
artist bowed, and waited for her to speak. 

"I daresay you know my name, Sir!" she said. 

"I have not the pleasure," he answered, curtly. 
Her voice had a most painful effect on him. 

"Poynder Mrs. George Poynder I am the aunt 
by marriage of the lady who has been living with 
you here for one calendar month! Don't attempt to 
deny it, man " 

She spoke so preposterously fast that he had no 
opportunity of doing so. Pointing to Jane Anne, 
who had slunk into the room during her speech, she 
continued : 

"This young lady will bear out what I have said, 
and the good people of the inn. There are plenty of 
Phoebe's things about; for instance, that object on 
the sofa you will hardly say it is yours, I presume? 
I saw besides, with my own eyes last night, an unpar- 
allelled scene of " 

Here the painter interrupted her by almost roaring 
out: 

"Please to leave the room, Jane Anne!" 

The girl, cowed, crept out. The painter continued : 

"If this lady is your niece, Madam, you will hardly 
wish to discuss her reputation in public. Now, all I 
have to say to you is this, that this is the parlour of 
the inn, common to all, and the only available sitting- 
room. Your niece, Miss ," he hesitated, he did 



THE HUMAN INTEEEST 175 

not remember to have ever called Mrs. Elles by any 
name "has been good enough to consent to share it 
with me during the time you name " 

"Nonsense ! Now look here ! it is no earthly use 
your beginning to tell me a pack of cock-and-bull 
stories like that!" struck in the old woman, and her 
overpowering emphasis actually silenced the man 
with the mere physical oppression of volume of sound 
and harsh quality of tone. The genius was no match 
for the virago. 

"I have stayed here, in this very inn, from last 
night. I meant to see for myself and I have seen ! 
The Vicar's wife if there is such a thing as a vicar 
in this God-forgotten place ! who was scandalized by 
the goings on here, wrote to me and apprised me that 
Mrs. Elles my niece by marriage -.perhaps you 
will have the brass to say that you did not know that 
she was a married lady?" 

"I certainly did not know" began the artist, 
almost mildly for the sake of another woman, grown 
suddenly dearer to him than she had been, he 
thought to exercise diplomacy in dealing with the 
coarse virago who held that woman's fate in her 
hands but it was of no avail, since she inter- 
rupted him again, stridently, volubly, overwhelm- 
ingly, so that his forehead contracted, and he turned 
pale under the mere shock of the impact of the words 
she flung at him. 

"Yes, my niece Phoebe ran away from her husband 
my nephew and came straight here to you, and has 



176 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

been living here with you for a clear month under an 
assumed name. That looks pretty bad, doesn't it? 
So bad that Mortimer my nephew will have no 
difficulty in getting his divorce?" 

"Divorce!" muttered Rivers, taken by surprise, 
and foolishly allowing her to see the shock her words 
had given him. 

"Yes indeed, divorce, what else would you have? 
He will be perfectly justified. The woman has 
always been a constant source of trouble and disgrace 
to him. She has never known how to behave her- 
self, and God knows what might have happened, and 
I, for one, am rare and glad to be shot of the little 
>! And now " 



Mrs. Poynder was not without a certain kind of 
penetration, and seeing herself in imminent danger 
of being ordered out of the room, adroitly concluded 
to be beforehand with the man whom she had goaded 
into fury. 

"And now, Sir, I will wish you a very good day!" 
she said, quite quietly, moving towards the door. 
"And since you are so very careful of Phoebe's repu- 
tation there isn't much of it but the landlady here 
tells me she was under the impression that you and 
she were courting. Well, perhaps now that you 
have ruined her, you will be gentleman enough to 
marry her. It is the very least you can do, when 
you have got her kicked out of her husband's 
house!" 

"And by God, I will, if it comes to that!" Rivers 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 177 

said, with sudden and determined emphasis. He 
strode to the door. 

"Now, Madam, have the goodness to leave my 
room." 

He held the door open for her as she passed out. 
He was white with rage. 

"I am sure I thought I heard you say it was the 
common parlour?" the terrible woman remarked to 
him, over her shoulder. 

A moment later, he seized his hat and went out. 
Jane Anne was waiting for him in the passage, her 
comely face marred with tears. She caught his hand 
and held it. 

"Oh, Mr. Eivers, do please forgive me! Mrs. 
Topham wrote the letter, she did indeed, and the 
other lady stayed here all night and saw you " 

He shook her hand off his sleeve, and passed out 
into the road, without even looking at her. 

Jane Anne looked at her hand the hand he had 
disdained as if she would like to cut it off. Her heavy 
brows contracted met together in a dull frown of 
rage and disappointment. 

"Then I'll just swear anything they like!" she 
muttered to herself. 



CHAPTER X 

Mrs. Elles, on arriving at Newcastle, took a fly and 
drove straight up to her own door. 

This detail was significant of the course she had 
undertaken to pursue, and the attitude she meant to 
assume with regard to her own life what was left 
of it. 

She was only thirty, she had presumably as many 
years again to live, and she had no intention of com- 
mitting suicide. On the contrary, she meant to go 
through the process known as picking up the pieces. 

Her policy of life was optimism pessimism was her 
pose. But her unconscious tendency was to look 
forward very much forward. The past she ignored, 
the present she disdained, the future she brooded 
over. It had always been so with her, even in the 
old days before this cyclone of emotion had swept 
over her, and the trivial round of things pleasant and 
unpleasant had been all her care and preoccupation. 
It would be so again. 

She had the peculiar shrewdness of the feather- 
brained, the perspicacity of the trivial-minded; and 
the practical basis of her nature, which had been 
overlaid and smothered for a time by her spasmodic 
access of passion for the artist, began to reassert 

178 



THE' HUMAN INTEREST 179 

itself. As the train passed easily through stations 
and scenes familiar, the domestic campaign of the 
immediate future took form and shape in her mind. 

All that was now possible ! She arranged it hope- 
lessly, drearily, but as satisfactorily as might be under 
the gods' dispensation. The door of Paradise was 
closed to her, she would make purgatory endurable. 
She had known the poetry of life, now for its prose. 
But dramatic and artistic fitness demanded that there 
should be no loose ends, no rough edges, no interfus- 
ing and overlapping of incompatible and discordant 
periods of existence. Her month of soul-fruition was 
to be a thing apart, a memory, complete, perfect, 
enshrined in her heart for ever and kept entirely clear 
of entanglement with the squalid phase of life that 
she was going to take up again. She was a reluctant 
but resolved Eurydice returning to the grey neutrali- 
ties of the Hades from which Orpheus had so nearly 
rescued her. 

Ch farb! She knew the song. What would 
Orpheus do without Eurydice? 

Alas ! in her shrewd heart of hearts she knew that 
Orpheus would do very well. Orpheus loved his 
Eurydice, but even the legend is compelled to admit 
that he went harping about the world; and Rivers 
would go on painting noble pictures and would soon 
forget her in his work, which even in the heyday of 
her influence had been paramount with him. 

She did not allow herself to lose sight of that fact. 
She knew in her humility and consequent clearness of 



180 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

perception that the idyllic month in the Brignal woods 
had been her epoch his episode. Propinquity and 
a vague sense of responsibility had led him to propose 
to her. 

She wished he had given her a ring a sketch 
anything, as a memorial of then* sojourn together. 
She had literally nothing of his but a stump of pencil 
which he had lent her the day before, and which she 
had forgotten to return. It was only a stump she 
must never permit herself to use it ; it must last her 
her life. She laughed at herself for thinking of this. 

Rivers would certainly approve of her plan. He 
had not allowed himself to preach at her, but he 
would of course wish her to make the best of Morti- 
mer and be a good wife to him henceforward. She 
would try but the very thought of Mortimer brought 
one of her headaches ! 

Driving up Grey Street from the station, she 
caught sight of various members of her little society. 
Miss Drummond was picking her way through the 
perennial mud of this unromantic city, and the poet 
was holding an umbrella over her. This looked like 
love like an engagement ! Had they got it settled 
during her absence? She was disposed to be kind to 
all lovers, but preferred them of the distressed variety ! 
She would have liked something left to her to do! 
But there were other lovers and other people in the 
world. She would begin her Friday "At Homes" 
again and her friends would muster and she would 
give them tea, and they would wonder why sho 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 181 

looked "different." There would be a look in her 
eyes which no one would remember having seen there 
before, a kind of "Love among the ruins" look, and 
she would not be able to smile quite so freely. 

The thought awakened her own ready sympathy 
for herself and there were tears in her eyes and a 
flush on her cheek when she stood on her own door- 
step and rang the bell of her own house. 

A new parlour-maid she could not help starting 
though she must have known on reflection that this 
would be the case opened the door and stood look- 
ing politely receptive. 

Mrs. Elles saw the comedy of the situation and 
laughed gently. Then she put a florin into the girl's 
hand, and, bidding her pay the cabman, brushed 
past her into the house and into the dining-room. 

The room was empty, unchanged, a little untidier 
than it used to be in her day. A sour look came over 
her face as the accustomed horrors smote her sense, 
fresh and undulled by previous contact with them. 

"If he has dared to touch my drawing-room!" she 
muttered and, opening the door of that apartment, 
surveyed it. 

It was just as she had left it, a passably pretty and 
tasteful room. She went up to the wall and instinct- 
ively set the frame of a picture straight. 

"Bring tea at once," she ordered peremptorily of 
the astonished maid, sitting down in her own especial 
place at the corner of the sofa. "Where is Mrs. 
Poynder?" 



182 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

"Oh, Miss, did you want Mrs. Poynder?" said the 
servant, with obvious relief. "Mrs. Poynder is away. 
She went into Yorkshire yesterday. Mrs. Elles is 
away too." 

"I am Mrs. Elles," said that lady calmly, judging 
that the comedy in the maid's case had lasted long 
enough. "You are the new parlour-maid, I suppose. 
What is your name? "When do you expect Mrs. 
Poynder back?" 

"Mrs. Poynder only went for the night, Miss 
Ma'am. She expects to be home for dinner." 

"What an extraordinary thing for Aunt Poynder 
to do!" said Mrs. Elles, speaking aloud. "Now go 
and get tea. I am dying for it." 

The girl went. Then her mistress gave one de- 
spairing look around the room and hid her face in the 
sofa cushion. Sorrow's crown of sorrow had come 
upon her suddenly the contrast between her own 
drawing-room and the little ascetic room at Rokeby, 
that spoke so clearly of its inmate, had come across 
her mind with cruel poignancy. 

"Oh; God, if it is going to be like this!" she mur- 
mured, choking with sobs. Only a few hours ago, in 
the plain bald room that was Paradise to her, and 
now here among all these pictures, photographs, 
books, symbols of the tedious domesticity she had 
been prepared to take up, but which struck her now 
as horrible, so much more horrible than she had 
anticipated ! 

"I hate you!" she said to the grandfather over the 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 183 

mantelpiece. She kicked the early Victorian 
embroidered footstool at her feet savagely away. 

The door opened a little and she wearily raised her 
eyes. Her little cat came wandering deviously in, 
having pushed the door open for itself, and, purring 
for joy of seeing her again, rubbed its head against 
the footstool and the foot. She looked down with a 
sudden fiendish instinct then seized the creature and 
kissed it and buried her face in its soft fur and let it 
lick away the tears that coursed down her cheeks 
uncontrollably. 

There was a crash of sticks in the hall how well 
she knew that sound ! Mortimer ! In spite of the 
comedy of the situation Mrs. Elles turned pale. It 
was the first time in her life that her husband had 
had that effect upon her. Through the chink in the 
door that the cat had made for itself, she saw a ver- 
tical slice of her husband. In a moment he would 
enter the room and the comedy would have to begin. 
She put down the cat and dried her eyes on the 
muslin chair-cover. 

Very rarely did Mortimer enter the drawing-room. 
If she had only thought of that ! He did not enter it 
now. He walked into his study and closed the door. 

Now he had made her feel foolish another rare 
occurrence. The only thing for her to do now was 
to go and "dig him out," in pursuance of her plan 
of making things go smoothly. She would do it, for 
once. And if she could only bring herself to put her 
arms round his neck and kiss him, also for once, 



184 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

domestic peace would be fully ensured, for a season 
at any rate. 

The memory of Rivers' farewell kiss that morning 
assailed her and she sat heavily down again, strug- 
gling, striving, gathering up her resolution. No, she 
could not kiss Mortimer, but she could be nice to 
him, and she would. 

She presently rose and with an assured step went to 
the study door and opened it. 

Mortimer was standing with his back to her, in 
front of a case of liqueurs that he kept there, and was 
in the act of pouring himself out a glass of brandy. 
Kiss him, indeed ! Under these conditions she could 
hardly be expected to go up to him and say 
"Peep-bo!" or "Guess who this is!" as she believed 
was done in the best bourgeois circles. 

She merely said "Mortimer!" as jauntily as she 
could. 

He turned. His face expressed no emotion but 
surprise, and he took a gulp of brandy from the glass 
he held before answering. 

She shuddered with disgust, but remarked in a 
lively tone: "Well, Mortimer, here I am and so 
much better for my little change. I simply had to 
go, and quickly too, or you would have had me break 
down on your hands. I hope you realize that but 
men never do!" 

Mortimer said nothing and she began to get a little 
nervous. 

"You don't seem to take much interest in my 



185 



travels, so I won't enter into particulars; but you can 
imagine the sort of thing for yourself perfect rest 
and quiet, and away from Aunt Poynder. By the 
way, where is Aunt Poynder?" 

"Haven't you seen her?" the man asked, with grim 
intention. 

"No. How should I?" she replied innocently. 
"Jane Mary whatever you call the new one 
said she had gone into Yorkshire for the night. 
What a funny thing for Aunt Poynder to do ! What 
possessed her? Perhaps she has gone away for a cure, 
like me." 

Mortimer here made an inarticulate sound and his 
wife was quick to interrupt him. 

"Oh, please don't begin to question me! Don't 
you see I am still rather nervous? Take me when 
you have got me, and be thankful. Are you not one 
little bit glad to see me?" 

"God, Phoebe, what a liar you are!" ho exclaimed, 
making a step forward. 

"Really, Mortimer!" 

"Read this!" he said violently, taking a crum- 
pled sheet of notepaper out of his breast coat pocket. 
"Read it, and then perhaps you'll know where your 
aunt is if you don't know already, which of course 
you do!" 

Mrs. Elles took the note out of his hands. 
"Don't, Mortimer, look at me as if you hated me!" 
she added deprecatingly. 

The address of the letter The Rectory, Greta 



186 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

Bridge was the first crowbar levelled at the fabric 
of the pose she had been keeping up so valiantly. 
Her knees shook under her. 

"Dear Sir," (the letter ran) 

"Will you excuse a perfect stranger for writing 
to you, but I fancy you will perhaps care to hear what 
I have to tell you. A young lady, who bears the 
address to which I write engraved on her umbrella, 
is staying here at the inn of this village under circum- 
stances which impel me, as the wife of the Vicar of 
this parish, to give you at least a hint of her where- 
abouts, so that you may exercise the powers of a 
guardian over her. The only other inmate of the 
'Heather Bell' is a single gentleman of the name of 
Rivers. The young lady calls herself Frick, a name 
which is not borne out by the initials on her objects 
of personal use. I may mention that she and Mr. 
Rivers share the same sitting-room. 

"Yours faithfully, 

"Florence Popham." 

Mrs. Elles raised her eyes, full of angry fire. The 
fighting instinct was aroused in her. 

"Silly meddlesome creature!" she said scornfully. 
"Why may I not stay where I like, and call myself 
what I like, and what is it to me or to you either who 
happens to be staying in the same inn?" 

"That's all bluff! We'll hear what your aunt 
has to say about that!" 

"My aunt! What on earth has she to do with 



THE HUMAN INTEEEST 187 

it?" And again her accent was truly surprised and 
therefore convincing. 

"You're a damn good actress, Phoebe! ... By 
Jove! Here is your aunt! . . . Stay where you 
are!" 

He seized her wrist with some violence just as Mrs. 
Poynder flung open the door of the room and stood 
aghast at the sight of Mrs. Elles. Then she banged 
her reticule, a strong, black, noticeably shabby one, 
down on the table, and Mrs. Elles 's eyes fastened 
on it. 

"You got a bit start of me, Fibby!" she said 
grimly, "but no matter. The old woman will be a 
match for you before she's done!" 

Mrs. Elles slid her wrist out of Mortimer's grasp, 
which tightened disagreeably when he gathered her 
intention of escape. 

"No violence, please, Mortimer," she said stagily. 
"I almost think I will leave you to discuss me with 
Aunt Poynder!" 

She left the room with no signs of unseemly haste, 
delighted to feel the grasp of her husband's fingers 
literally smarting on her arm. Cruelty! She had 
heard of that. 

She went straight upstairs to her own room and 
locked herself in. It had been a sudden and brilliant 
inspiration of hers to leave them. She wanted very 
much to hear what it was that her aunt had to say 
to her husband, but still more she did want time to 
think. The ground had been cut beneath her feet. 



188 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

She felt like Alnaschar when his basket of eggs was 
rudely kicked away from him. A completely new plan 
of action was imperative, and how could she act when 
she was so dreadfully in the dark and so puzzled by 
her husband's constant allusions to Mrs. Poynder, 
whom she had not seen since she left Newcastle? 

But stay! In her hurried glimpse of Mrs. 
Poynder she had realized that that lady was wearing 
a black dress, trimmed with little shining things, as 
Rivers had called them, and that the black bag that 
she had slammed down on the table was the one that 
Rivers had described as belonging to the unknown 
visitor at the Heather Bell on that summer night that 
seemed so long ago and was only last night. And 
the face seen at the window at the very moment 
when she had fallen into her lover's arms, for the 
first and only time ! All these things came crowding 
into her mind ; a bewildering vision of what had been 
rose before her eyes, with the damning significance 
in ears inimical of all the little foolish foolhardy 
things she had done in the innocent audacity of her 
unreturned love and she realized how she and 
Rivers had been betrayed ! 

She must find out how much and what Aunt Poyn- 
der had seen before she committed herself by a single 
word. She must be clever and diplomatic to the full 
extent of her powers. Her excitement grew as she 
sat there on the edge of the bed thinking out a plan 
many plans, and she bounded to her feet when 
there came a very ordinary knock at the door. 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 189 

"Come in!" she cried, forgetting that she had 
locked it. 

There was a furious rattling and "How can I?" 
came in Mrs. Poynder's angry voice. 

Mrs. Elles had taken her line. 

"Oh, I forgot," she said, insolently. "Well, you 
can say what you want to through the keyhole. I 
shall hear you well enough." 

"Do you want all the servants to hear what I have 
to say?" 

"I haven't the slightest objection, if you haven't," 
said Mrs. Elles, airily. 

"You're quite shameless, then?" 

"Perhaps, Aunt, you had better take care what 
you say, for your own sake." 

"For my own sake, says she! Jane Poynder has 
nought to be ashamed of. But I should have 
thought, after what I saw last night with my own 
eyes " 

"Through the keyhole?" interrupted her niece 
impertinently. 

"Through the window, woman! the window of 
the hotel where you were living with " 

"Hush, Aunt," Mrs. Elles interrupted again this 
time really for the sake of the servants and common 
decency. And then there was nothing fine, dramatic 
or romantic about this discussion; it sickened her. 
Not so should a husband accuse his wife of infidelity : 
through the mouth of a vulgar, foul-mouthed 
beldam. How different from Hero's "Let me but 



190 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

know of what man I am accused" ! Still it behooved 
her to listen and learn, if she could, from Aunt Poyn- 
der the precise terms of the indictment against her. 

"And I saw you in his arms," continued the old 
lady, "and the girl Jane Anne saw you walking hand 
in hand out in the public street! Don't attempt to 
deny it!" 

In point of fact Mrs. Elles said nothing, but Mrs. 
Poynder thought she did, and her fury rose. 

"You have the face ! Well, it's more than 

your man has. He turned as white as a leaf when I 
was giving him a piece of my mind this morning. 
He'd nothing to say for himself except that your room 
was the common room. " 

"So it was!" 

"Tell that to me! I know what's what. It's I 
that made him promise to marry you, when all's said 
and done. But, Lord! trust him! He'll not 
touch you with a pair of tongs! Men aren't so 
fond of marrying the women they have disgraced. 
Mercy, what's that?" she added in extreme pertur- 
bation. 

"Only the dinner gong, Aunt," said Mrs. Elles, 
spitefully smiling on the other side of the door. She 
had learned what she wanted. "I can't come down, " 
she said decidedly. "Tell Mortimer to come up here 
and speak to me after he has dined." 

"You give your orders, my lady!" grumbled the 
older woman. "What's to say that Mortimer's going 
to condescend to even speak to you?' ' 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 191 

"Give him my message," said Mrs. Elles peremp- 
torily. 

Mrs. Poynder's footsteps creaked on the stairs as she 
withdrew, and her angry mutterings were like a heavy 
ground swell at sea as she went downstairs. How 
her niece loathed her ! And the man whose comfort 
and well-being she placed before every other earthly 
consideration had been exposed for at least half an 
hour to that malign influence. She realized the full 
horrors of the scene at the Heather Bell which her 
aunt had only faintly adumbrated, and most of her 
thought was for him. 

"I must get him out of this," she said to herself, 
"at all costs! I used to think myself clever I shall 
be clever if I manage this. I don't care a pin for 
myself, but for him! If I only knew something 
about it all how they set about these things. What 
can be done? What is possible? If only I could look 
it up somewhere." 

A vain glance at the little bookcase stocked with 
Ibsens and Merediths did not help her. 

"What is the good of yon?" she said, apostrophis- 
ing them violently. "You are no good when it 
comes to the serious crises of life. Even a common 
old 'Enquire Within' would be better. I don't 
know what it is I am in for what it all means. Can 
Mortimer divorce me straight away? What is the 
formula?" She wrung her hands. "If only I could 
keep his name out of it?" 

She unlocked the door of her room and went out 



192 THE HUMAN INTEREST 



upon the landing and looked down over the banisters. 
Mortimer was dining! "Though empires crumble," 
she murmured to herself. She heard the clatter of 
knives and forks; through the long well-like slip 
between the banisters she could see the parlour-maid 
carrying dishes. Mortimer was dining well, and 
intending to divorce his wife ! 

She was too frightened to properly enjoy the an- 
tithesis. She went back into her own room and lay 
down upon the bed, shakiug in every limb. She had 
eaten hardly anything that day. 

She must have dozed a little. She woke with a 
start, to see a broad shaft of light coming in from the 
doorway, and her husband, a stout undignified sort 
of avenging angel, standing on the threshold. She 
sprang into a sitting posture. 

"Make some light!" he said impatiently. 

"Why bother?" she said languidly. "You can see 
to scold me quite well enough in the dark!" 

"Scold!" he said, in an accent of contemptuous 
reproach, coming nearer. He was flushed, but quite 
sober. She wondered if he really had had the heart 
to dine. 

He enlightened her. "You don't seem to realize, " 
he said, "the position of affairs. I have been quite 
unable to eat any dinner." 

"What about me? But, however, that is neither 
here nor there. The point is" assuming as vira- 
goish an air as she could "will you please tell me 
what you can have meant by allowing Aunt Poynder 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 193 

to come up here as your emissary and abuse me, your 
wife, and say awful things out loud for all the house 
to hear?" 

"You are begging the question, Phoebe," her hus- 
band said, and in his earnestness and sincerity he was 
almost dignified. "You must know how serious all 
this is ! What have you to say in explanation of the 
charges which Aunt Poynder brings against you, and 
that woman's letter to me which I showed you?" 

"What are the charges?" she asked valiantly and 
without the flippancy with which she had thought fit 
to characterize all her previous remarks. 

"Wait!" he said, and she gave a little frightened 
cry, and clutched his arm. 

"What are you going to do, Mortimer?" 

"I am going to look at your face while you sit 
there and lie to me!" he said, striking a match, and 
lighting the gas. It showed her countenance 
frightened and pale, his reddish and set. Even in 
her agitation she was struck by the expression he had 
used. It was the second time she had been taxed 
with the mendacious habit. She began to think 
there was something in it. It was, however, the 
first time Mortimer had permitted himself to allude 
to it so roundly. She was nonplussed by his atti- 
tude ; she had expected him to bluster and be ridicu- 
lous. He was dignified even to a tragedy. The 
thought crossed her mind that he still loved her, 
which would make it difficult for him to adopt the 
point of view she was intending to put before him. 



194 THE HUMAN INTEEEST 

"Mortimer," she said, raising her eyes to his 
with an intentional effect of extreme and busi- 
ness-like candour, "what Aunt Poynder tells you 
she saw she did see, but the inferences she draws are 
fake." 

"Explain yourself more clearly." 

"I mean" she strictly persevered in her steadfast 
gaze "that it is not true that I have been unfaithful 
to you." 

"Not !" 

"I swear it," she said simply, "but I do not expect 
you to believe me. Are you going to divorce me?" 

"What and leave you free to run off and join 
your lover!" roared Mortimer in a spasm of jealous 
rage. "I'm " 

"I have no lover I wish I had!" she interrupted. 
Her sad sincerity had a convincingness her husband 
was too angry to apprehend. 

"Mortimer," she went on, clasping her hands, 
"could you possibly divorce me I know nothing of 
these things without having a co-respondent at all? 
I do so hate having him dragged in!" 

The solicitor stared at her. 

"Mortimer, isn't it possible? You are a man of 
business, you ought to know about these things. We 
do get on so badly together, don't we? It is quite 
hopeless our trying to get on. Isn't there there 
must be some sort of arrangement by which hus- 
band and wife can agree to live apart because they are 
unsuited to each other, without dragging in a third 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 195 

person? There isn't a third person, I do assure you, 
and I know how he would hate it. This poor man 
Aunt Poynder saw is a painter a hater of women. I 
bored him really, only I laid myself out to please him 
and plagued his life out ! I interfered terribly with 
his work. You would not understand how. He 
wanted to be left alone. Artists are like that. He 
did not know I was married, and when he found I had 
compromised myself against him that's the only 
honest way to put it he proposed to me because he 
was a gentleman and thought he ought. It is I who 
am to blame, for trying to make him like me. I 
kissed him, not he me! ... I am a wretch, I 
know, but if only you knew how miserable my life is 
here with you! We ought never to have married. 
Let me go ! I am sure you will be happier without 
me, believe me ! Let me go quietly let it be between 
you and me! Don't let all' the world in! Don't 
ruin an innocent man's life over it for it would! 
He is a Eoyal Academician and might be President 
some day, and if he is forced to marry me he will lose 
that and his position in the world, and it is such a 
good one. Besides, he is engaged to be married to 
another woman he really is!" 

She paused breathless, and caught hold of his 
hand. He shook her off. 

"Lies! Lies! Lies!" he said. "I don't believe a 
single word you have been saying, Phoebe. And as 
for a judicial separation between us, which is what 
you seem to want, I say 'No, thank you.' The laws 



196 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

are made to enable a man to get completely rid of 
such a woman as you!" 

He left her and she heard him leave the house. It 
was exactly nine o'clock. 



CHAPTER XI 

She knew what she had to do. She composed her 
features and covered them with powder, and rang the 
bell. 

It was the cook who answered it, not the new 
parlour maid. The cook, whom Mrs. Poynder 
worked hard and bullied, was in consequence a firm 
ally of the young and far niente mistress of the house, 
who preferred pleasant and nattering looks even to 
good service. 

"Mary," Mrs. Elles said urbanely, "come and help 
me! I want to catch the night mail for the south." 

They pulled open drawers and dragged in trunks. 
Mrs. Elles was not sure that she was not leaving her 
husband's house for ever, and she did not mean to go 
without her things. The two women worked hard, 
carrying on a fragmentary conversation the while. 

"How has your master been while I was away?" she 
asked of the cook, proud of being able to show that 
amount of good feeling. 

"He's not been to say sae well. The doctor's been 
in once or twice, to please the missis Mrs. Poynder, 
I mean. But the master doesn't seem to hold with 
doctors much." 

"No, I know he hates them," said his wife, care- 
197 



198 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

fully controlling her surprise. It was natural that 
Mortimer should have given way a little during her 
absence, partly through temper, and partly for want 
of her supervision, but still a little fit of excess did 
not seem to indicate so important a step as the calling 
in of doctors. "But I wonder why I have not heard 
anything of all this except through you?" she added, 
forgetting to be prudent. "What was it?" 

"Oh, just a fainting fit like. Missis Poynder found 
him in his study a day or two back, and it took a fair 
half hour to bring him round." 

"Why wasn't I telegraphed for?" 

"Eh, ma'am,. ye were away for your health, and so 
Missis Poynder thought she wouldn't go for to agitate 
ye. It's all passed off, but the doctor he says as 
Master behoved to be car 'ful." 

"Heart?" murmured Mrs. Elles, with the inter- 
rogative inflexion, not liking to ask a direct question. 
She was really a little anxious. She did not positively 
hate her husband. 

"Yes, that's what doctor said. Avoid excite- 
ment sperrits the worst thing!" 

Everyone in the house knew that this prohibition 
was by no means unnecessary. 

"Well, Mary, you must look after him while I am 
away. I am going up to London on business. See 
that he has what he likes." She pressed five shil- 
lings into the cook's hand, feeling the glow of accom- 
plishment of the whole duty of a married woman and 
picturesque forgiveness of insult and injuries. 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 199 

Her packing was done. It was half-past eleven. 
She had a whole hour before her. 

Of the laws of her country she had about as much 
practical knowledge as most women that is to say 
none at all ! She was full of the proposition she had 
made to Mortimer, of a bloodless duel, an amicable 
separation, a social catastrophe which should affect 
herself only, leaving Rivers untouched. The engage- 
ment between Rivers and Egidia, which she was going 
to London to suggest, would surely tell very much in 
favour of her plan, but she must neglect nothing, 
leave no stone unturned for the accomplishment of 
his salvation. She had made up her mind to work 
this thing for Rivers, to be his diplomatic angel, and 
that her heroic plan involved the surrendering of him 
to another woman only added to the sublimity of the 
act. 

She went down to her husband's study; she knew 
he was out; she hoped she would not have the ill 
luck to meet Mrs. Poynder. 

The house was perfectly still. There stood the 
row of collected legal wisdom, dusty, dull, abstruse, 
but full of vital truths for her at this moment. In a 
few minutes she was deep in law, and covered and 
daubed with its dust. 

She found no hint of a previous engagement of the 
co-respondent being considered as a circumstance 
invalidating the divorce, but she saw that she and 
her husband must on no account sleep under the 
same roof to-night. That was why he had gone out. 



200 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

He probably did not intend to return. It was a pity 
he did not know that she was going to take the 
initiative and leave him, and could not see her boxes 
at that very moment standing in the hall, strapped 
and corded and mountainous. 

She stood there, taking down one volume after 
another, feeling the thief of knowledge, since it was 
from her husband's own books that she was gleaning 
the wherewithal to discomfit him when the time came. 
At any rate they would start f air ! About on a level 
with her hand, she noticed a Blue Book on the Laws 
of Divorce. She eagerly took it down from the shelf. 
It seemed clearly written and fairly explanatory. 

"There is no divorce by mutual consent of husband 
and wife." 

She saw that she had been talking nonsense to 
Mortimer upstairs. How he must have laughed at 
her absurd proposition ! 

"The Causes of Divorce." This seemed a useful 
heading ! She read on eagerly. 

"Attempt by one of the parties on the life of the 
other, either personally, or by an accomplice." 

But she had not attempted Mortimer's life, nor had 
Rivers attempted that of Mortimer, and though she 
had heard of cruelty, she had not thought of this 
definition of it. 

"I had no idea the laws of my country were so 
absurd!" she exclaimed, laying down the blue book 
in a pet. Then a glance at its cover showed her that 
the volume she held referred to the Laws of Foreign 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 201 

Countries, and this was the procedure of the Argen- 
tine Republic that she was looking at! 

She gave that up, and reached down Stephen's 
Commentaries, and tried to find some hint there that 
would be useful to her. 

She read on it for a good quarter of an hour, bnt 
the legal phrases puzzled her, the scantiness of details 
left her uncertain, the heavy volumes tired her hands 
to hold. She was no wiser, and a good deal wearier. 

The door opened behind her. Instinctively she 
turned round. 

"Oh, Mortimer, what is a femme sole?" 

She laughed to herself, as the train sped southwards 
through the night, when she thought of her last sight 
of her husband as he stood in the doorway, apparently 
transfixed by her extraordinarily indiscreet question. 
His abrupt volte face and retreat reminded her that 
an injured husband is not to be used as an Encyclo- 
paedia Britannica. Henceforth she was as a noxious 
animal, to be got rid of, not argued with. She 
laughed, and then she cried, but finally her offended 
dignity won the day, and the train deposited a hero- 
ine, rugless, hopeless, comfortless, but still a heroine, 
every inch of her, on the platform at King's Cross in 
the early dawn. 

She took a room at the Great Northern Hotel and 
waited in all the day till the calling hour, except for 
a little excursion to a jeweller's shop near the station, 
where she sold her one magnificent diamond ring for 



202 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

about a third of its value. At four o'clock she 
dressed herself beautifully and took a hansom to 
Queen Anne's Mansions, where Egidia lived. She 
made sure of finding the novelist at home ; she had 
heard her say she was at home on Fridays ; if she was 
not alone she would outstay the other callers. As she 
drove along she looked at herself critically in the 
little glass in the corner of the cab. 

"Talk of the empire of the mind over the body, it 
is nothing to that of the mind over the complexion!" 
she said to herself, but was pleased to see that two 
sleepless nights had only made her eyes larger and 
her face more interesting. Looks are the sinews of a 
woman's war and, though she was not going to 
quarrel with Egidia but merely give up her lover to 
her, her prettiness would serve to mark and accentu- 
ate her heroism. 

It was five o'clock when her cab drove under the 
archway and pulled up at the big door which is the 
portal to so many homes. Egidia lived very near the 
top, but she preferred to walk up, she was afraid of 
the lift. On the threshold of the door which was the 
novelist's, as the boy who rang the bell for her 
informed her, she caught her dress in the mat and 
stumbled as the maid opened the door. 

"It means something!" she said to herself. 

It meant that she was nervous. She was going to 
do an absurd thing ; make a most curiously intimate 
proposition to a woman she hardly knew ! It was like 
a scene in a novel. If only Egidia would not be too 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 203 

matter-of-fact, would consent to stay in the picture, 
as it were ! As a novelist she would be apt for irregu- 
lar situations, and able to enjoy and employ them. 

The parlour-maid mumbled her name, which she 
had mumbled to her. Egidia, in a red teagown, like 
a handsome velvet moth, rose from a low seat to 
receive her, and Mrs. Elles felt like a frivolous butter- 
fly in the somewhat freakish, bizarre habiliments in 
which she elected to express her personality. 

"Oh, it is you!" exclaimed the novelist, her lips 
breaking into a kind smile and her eyes diffusing 
cordiality, as she held out both hands. 

A tall figure rose from his seat on the other side of 
the fireplace, and Mrs. Elles 's eyes were fixed on him 
while Egidia was speaking. 

"So you have found your way here at last ! Where 
are you staying? Let me introduce Mr. Edmund 
Rivers Mrs. Mortimer Elles!" 

Why should he not be calling on Egidia? It was 
the most natural thing. Mrs. Elles had never 
thought of this contingency, and yet she would not 
have had it not happen for the world. She was not 
a woman who would go out of her way to avoid situ- 
ations. She bowed he bowed; and then Egidia 
seeming by her manner to prescribe a greater inti- 
macy, they shook hands. Oh ! why was it so dark? 
She could not see his face. 

"Will you ring the bell, Edmund, please, for 
another cup. Mrs. Elles, you must have some tea!" 

"Thank you, no. I think I won't " began 



204 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

Mrs. Elles. To calmly sit down and drink a cup of 
tea at a juncture like this ! It was not to be thought 
of. 

"Oh, but you must. North country people can't 
do without their tea, I know that. Only in London 
we don't have sweet little cakes like yours. What do 
you call them girdle cakes?" 

So Egidia ran on, putting her visitor into a chair 
and pouring out a cup of tea and looking after her 
comfort in the most solicitous manner. Mrs. Elles 
felt that, considering "everything," this made her 
look ridiculous but then Egidia could not be 
expected to know about "everything"! Rivers 
would surely not have told her about what had hap- 
pened in the woods of Brignal. That was their affair 
hers and his. Egidia would never have received 
her like this had she known. She felt a warm glow 
of pleasure on recognising the bond between her and 
him of a common secret. 

But he was very cleverly neutral in manner. As 
he handed her the cake his eyes met hers with a 
curious look, searching but impenetrable. It discon- 
certed her. It seemed to take her all in, but it gave 
nothing out. But she was at least positive that there 
was no love in it, no pleasurable excitement in a loved 
mistress refound. Under the oppression of this idea 
she took a draught of hot tea that scalded her and in 
the access of pain that ensued persuaded herself that 
she was glad of the counter-irritant. 

"Look, Mrs. Elles, at this little sketch Mr. Rivers 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 205 

has just given me for my birthday," Egidia was Bay- 
ing, as she held up a framed water-colour drawing 
lovingly. 

Mrs. Elles looked at it. The rush of recollection 
was not so blinding as she expected, but poignant 
enough. 

"Where is it?" she asked, for form's sake. She 
knew well enough. 

"May I tell her, Edmund?" 

He made a little nod in the affirmative. 

"Well, he could scarcely try to keep that Knowl- 
edge from me," Mrs. Elles thought to herself. 

"It is Rokeby," Egidia went on, "Scott's Eokeby 
that place where Mr. Rivers works so much. 
Rather near your part of the world, I believe." 

"I know it well," Mrs. Elles said. 

Rivers was standing abstractedly a few yards away 
from the two women. Mrs. Elles resented his lack 
of emotional interest. 

"It is quite charming!" she said, raising her voice. 
"And is that a little figure I see on the edge of the 
stream? Some village girl you got to stand for you, I 
suppose?" 

It was no village girl, and she knew it. It was 
herself, done by her own desire. She had begged 
him to put in some human interest for once, and he 
had indulgently agreed to do so, on condition she 
supplied it herself. She had posed for twenty min- 
utes under a broiling sun, and had refused the gift of 
the sketch when it was done. She had somehow 



206 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

wished that the memento of her should be retained by 
him, not her. 

No, he could never have cared for her, or he could 
never have borne to give away that sketch to another 
woman ! Her lips stiffened and then quivered. Had 
she known what was actually the fact, that the cir- 
cumstance of her posing for that particular sketch 
had completely lapsed from the painter's memory, 
would she have been less distressed? 

"That is the very reason I chose it," Egidia said, 
taking the drawing out of her hands. "Mr. Rivers 
gave me my choice of the Rokeby sketches, and out 
of a whole quantity of them in his studio I chose this 
one because it had a little human interest in it. I 
like people, you know. I should feel the world so 
cold, so dull, without them. I can't think how you, 
Cousin Edmund, manage to do without them so 
nicely!" 

The painter actually laughed from an excess of 
nervousness, Phoebe Elles hoped. 

"Do say that I may bring Mrs. Elles to see your 
studio one day? I am sure she would like to see it!" 

"I should be delighted," he said, "only you know 
a landscape painter's studio is not much to look at. 
Now Tadema's " 

"Ah! but then Mrs. Elles is not blasee on the sub- 
ject of studios as yet, are you, Mrs. Elles? She wants 
to see a little bit of everything now that she is here, 
don't you? You remember our conversation in New- 
castle? We must go about a little together and see 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 207 

the sights. I don't mean the Tower and the Monu- 
ment you are of course far above those. You might 
ask us to tea in your studio," she ended, turning, 
suddenly appealing, to Eivers. 

"She wants to show off her intimacy with him," 
Mrs. Elles thought bitterly. 

"I will," said Rivers gravely. "You must write 
and name your own day. It will have to be when I 
come back from Paris." 

"Oh, are you going to Paris?" Egidia exclaimed, 
obviously surprised and completely uninstructed in 
his movements. 

"I think I shall have to, on business ; but I will let 
you know when I come back, and I will try to get a 
few interesting people to meet you and your 
friend!" 

Mrs. Elles had to make what she could out of the 
slight hesitation. He smiled, forcedly she was sure 
it was forcedly. 

Egidia 's face was wreathed in kindly natural smiles 
as he bade good-bye so was hers. It was pathetic. 
Mrs. Elles, with her superior knowledge of "fearful 
consequences, yet hanging in the stars," felt as if 
they were all dancing on a grave treading a volcano. 
She knew well enough that she would never go to tea 
with him, never touch his hand again perhaps, as she 
gave hers, and dreamt of the accustomed thrill of 
pleasure that the mere contact used to give her. It 
did not now. Was it that she was too nervous, too 
frightened to be receptive, or was it that his mag- 



208 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

netism had ceased to flow for her, as a consequence of 
his indifference? 

He raised the heavy portiere, and the light seemed 
to go out of two women's lives as it fell to behind 
him. 

"Well," said Egidia, complacently, "that will be 
the first tea party my cousin has ever given in his 
studio in his life, to my knowledge ! I do hope it 
will come off, for I want you two to be great friends. 
You will you are the veritable antithesis of each 
other." 

Mrs. Elles interrupted her with a sudden burst of 
hysterical laughter. 

"Friends!" she said. "Friends! And my hus- 
band is going to make a co-respondent of him!" 



CHAPTEE XII 

Egidia laid her head on her hands. The tale of 
Brignal Banks had been told. "Good God!" she 
Baid passionately. "And it is to Edmund Bivers that 
this thing has happened!" 

She thought of the poignant tale of love and 
disaster only as it affected the man. It was natural ; 
Mrs. Elles had expected that she would do so, and 
yet she was a little aggrieved at not being treated as 
the central figure of any romance that happened to 
be forward. She valiantly stifled her feelings on this 
occasion, however, and rising from the low prie-dieu 
chair from which she had delivered her confession, 
knelt at Egidia's feet, and gently pulled her hands 
down from her face. The gesture was pretty and 
appealing, but at this juncture it irritated the other 
woman almost beyond endurance by its dash of 
theatricality. Thus behave erring heroines of melo- 
drama when they reveal "all" to their mentors. 
Egidia sat and stared at the little flushed face oppo- 
site her with an almost unfriendly gaze, and listened 
but coldly to the trickle of her excitable speech. 

"But it must not happen!" Mrs. Elles was saying. 
"It must not! It must not! You can save him, if 
you will, and that is why I have come to you. I 

209 



210 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

have travelled all night, and I have not slept for 
two. If I tell my story badly, that's why. There's 
an iron band across my forehead, And I have had 
nothing to eat for ages. But I knew that you and he 
had always been great friends, to say the very least, 

and that it would be so easy for you You must 

forgive me, and understand that I did what I could. 
I acted for the best on the spur of the moment. I 
thought it was the only way to save the situation " 

"What, in the name of Heaven, have you done?" 
exclaimed the other. "Do, please, tell me exactly." 

"I used your name " began Mrs. Elles, hesi- 
tatingly. 

"Please go on!" 

"I am afraid I told my husband straight out, when 
he pressed me, that Mr. Rivers was engaged to you!" 

"To me! Mr. Rivers! What possible author- 
ity " 

Egidia rose to her feet, and Mrs. Elles perforce rose 
too. 

"Have I done such a mischief?" she asked suppli- 
catingly. "Stay ! the lace of my dress has got caught 
in yours!" 

She disentangled it, while Egidia stood, a prisoner, 
shivering with impatience, and some disgust. 

"Surely," Phoebe Elles went on, "you are very 
fond of each other? I always thought so, from the 
way he spoke or rather did not speak of you. 
With some men reticence about a woman is the sure 
sign of their feeling keenly about her. Indeed, I was 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 211 

quite jealous of you sometimes!" she added ingenu- 
ously. 

Egidia's face had stiffened into the very haughtiest 
expression a proud face can assume. She was a 
woman who could curl her lip, and she did it now, 
but Mrs. Elles was too tactless and too much excited 
to notice. 

"So you see that I am doing this entirely for his 
sake quite against the grain, I assure you, but it 
seemed the only way and I thought you would want 
to do anything to keep him out of it!" 

"Keep him out of it!" exclaimed the other, point- 
ing down towards the basement of her own house, as 
to the depths of an imaginary Divorce Court. "I 
should think I did ! But how could you suppose that 
such an absurd lie as that could do him any good?" 

"Couldn't it? I thought it could. And I seem 
to be always being scolded for telling lies now!" 
sighed Mrs. Elles, "but I really thought I was splen- 
dide mendax this time ! And though it was a lie, of 
course, you can make it true to save him, don't you 
see?" 

Egidia recovered herself. What was the use of 
being angry? 

"But supposing Mr. Rivers did care for was 
engaged to me I don't see what possible difference 
it could make?" 

She succeeded in smiling almost indulgently on this 
sweet simpleton, who was to be suffered gladly, for 
the sake of Rivers. 



212 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

"Well, of course, I don't know much about these 
things," Mrs. Elles said, plaintively, "but I thought 
if the co-respondent " 

"Please don't use that word," said Egidia, shiver- 
ing. 

"It is the word, I know that much. Well, if the 
man is already engaged to someone else at the time 
that the accusation is made it surely makes it less 
likely that he would wouldn't a jury think better of 
him? He would have to marry her at once, of 
course, and send the slip of the Times containing the 
announcement to my husband " 

She looked so serious, so innocent, so like the fair 
Ophelia, "incapable of her own grief," so utterly 
woe-begone, that Egidia's mood changed. She 
laughed, and sat down, and took her visitor's little 
soft, incompetent, feverish hand in her own cool firm 
one, and held it. 

"My dear Mrs. Elles, have you been all these years 
married to a solicitor, and know BO little of it all as 
to suppose that a jury would be affected by such a 
detail as the one you have mentioned ! No, no, we 
must get your husband to stay proceedings alto- 
gether. I hope it isn't so bad as you think in fact, 
I am sure it isn't! Your husband could not, I think, 
possibly divorce you merely on what you have told 
me and perhaps you have even exaggerated that a 
little? You are very tired " 

"I am not hysterical!" exclaimed Mrs. Elles 
angrily. 



THE HUMAN INTEKEST 213 

"Forgive me, but your voice and your eyes belie 
you. Besides, you said yourself you were ill. Of 
course you are, naturally, after what you have under- 
gone!" 

"It was pretty dreadful!" Mrs. Elles owned, 
mollified. 

"To-morrow," Egidia continued, with a little 
imperceptible shudder, "you must go over it all again 
to me. After you have had a night's rest, you will 
be able to think and marshall your facts more clearly. 
I ought to know exactly where we stand. Meantime, 
will you send for your things from the Great North- 
ern Hotel and pay your bill?" 

"But I must live somewhere!" exclaimed the other 
in a sick fright. "You surely don't want me to go back 
to Mortimer, when I have just run away from him?" 

"No, but you must write to him, and tell him you 
are staying here with me. Though literary, I am 
supposed to be respectable." She smiled. She had 
taken her line. "And, by the way, I have a dinner 
party here to-night, and I want you to enjoy it and 
look nice." 

"I have an evening dress in my box at the Hotel," 
said Mrs. Elles, eagerly. 

"Well, then, we will get it here in time for you. I 
will send at once." 

She rang the bell, gave her orders, and then turn- 
ing, stopped and kissed the little bit of thistledown 
who stood there, grateful and apprehensive. It was 
an effort, the whole scene had been one long effort, 



214 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

but she flattered herself she had come out of it well, 
and had not betrayed herself. In the exercise of her 
profession she had studied the feelings of others and 
their development and outward manifestations so 
closely that she had grown almost morbidly desirous 
of not showing her own. 

"Please call me Phoebe!" her visitor had murmured 
as she led her to her room and left her there. 

Yes, she, a simple, honest, unsophisticated woman, 
would do anything, dare, contrive, and practise any- 
thing that might deliver Edmund Eivers from the 
consequences of his accidental connection with this 
miracle of indiscretion, this butterfly, who, unfortu- 
nately for others, took herself so seriously. 

He should not, if she could help it, have to rue the 
day when he had allowed the human interest to come 
into his life, and occupy even a portion of his mental 
foreground. That was all he had done ; he had never 
flirted with her, Egidia felt sure. "Love plays the 
deuce with landscape!" he had once laughingly pro- 
claimed, to excuse himself from marrying. No, he 
should not be forced, by the stain of the courts, the 
horrors of imputation, to take on himself the shackles 
of the marriage tie, with which the little woman who 
had played the part of his evil genius, would so care- 
lessly invest him ! 

"She kissed me, but all the while, she would like 
to scratch my eyes out," Mrs. Elles in the silence of 
the spare room was saying to herself. She was not 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 215 

spiteful oh no, that was not her character at all 
but she had studied and could not help knowing 
human nature ! There was no misprision of motive 
in her mind; she was perfectly aware of Egidia's 
reasons for being kind to her. That lady had taken 
her rival to stay with her because, as the saying is, 
she preferred to see mischief in front of her she 
would keep her safe under her own roof the better to 
control her. It was all for the man's sake, not for 
the woman's at all! 

The welfare of Edmund Eivers was the object of 
Phoebe Elles too, she must not forget that, and she 
must consent, for his sake, to be the creature of his 
cousin's bounty. It must be so, but it was very 
hard. Egidia, perhaps unconsciously, assumed 
proprietary airs. Her visitor stamped a little modest 
stamp of the foot at the thought, and was assailed by 
a wild desire to prove to Egidia and the world the 
genuineness of Eivers' love, by purposely losing her 
case, and letting him marry her ! 

But would that prove it? 

"Les hommes sont la cause que les femmes ne 
s'aiment pas!" Mrs. Elles murmured to herself, as 
arrayed in her prettiest dress, and conscious that she 
became it, she went to dinner, in the big public 
room of the Mansions, where Egidia mustered all her 
famous little parties of twelve. 

This was Mrs. Elles 's first taste of London 
society. She had thought of it, dreamed of it, 



216 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

yearned for it for years. Now it had come to her, 
like a draught of heady champagne, vivifying after 
the two nights of waking misery and anxiety she 
had undergone. Only two nights ago, she had 
stood, a shaking, quaking figure in the dark passage 
of the inn at Rokeby, hearing the clock tick, and the 
rustle of the heavy leaf screen against the pane out- 
side the door of her lover's room, whence no sound 
came no voice of pardon. Here in the successful 
novelist's pretty electric-lighted rooms all was gaiety, 
easy, social merriment, facile smiles and light-hearted 
repartee. She was made for this. She held her 
own. She smiled and retorted with all but the last 
touch of up-to-dateness, and her hostess put her for- 
ward, and gave her every opportunity of shining. 
Mrs. Elles thoroughly appreciated her generosity, 
and, woman-like, was far more deeply touched by 
Egidia's kindness in this instance, than by her 
greater charity in so ardently espousing her cause in 
the matter of the divorce. 

She for a time forgot the Damocles sword that 
hung over her head. In a few months, perhaps, 
nobody would care to speak to her ; now they were at 
any rate glad enough to do so. She went in to 
dinner with Mr. St. Jerome, the popular novelist, 
and he seemed to think her interesting. She had 
intended at first to try to sink her disqualification of 
country cousin, but by the time they had got to the 
first entree, decided otherwise, since the assumption 
of mundaneity prevented her asking questions, and 



THE HUMAN INTEKEST 217 

she did so want to know so many things. She would 
make conversational capital out of it instead. 

"Is every one here a celebrity?" she asked. 

"So much so, that they are all trying to hide it," 
St. Jerome answered. "Did you ever see a more 
modest looking set of people, calmly eating their 
fish, and saving their good things for their books?" 

"Are you doing that too?" she asked with the 
sweetest of smiles. She knew he wrote novels. She 
allowed a little time to elapse before she removed the 
sting, then "Because, if so, you succeed very badly. 
You have said several things I shall feel obliged to 
use again in the provinces. But forgive me, I am 
like Pope's definition of a mark of interrogation " 

"You want to know who that is?" he said briskly, 
indicating a dark, bearded man, with impressive eyes, 
who sat next Egidia. 

"How quick you are!" 

"Not at all. Everybody wants to know who Dr. 
Andre is!" 

She felt snubbed ; he went on. 

"He is the celebrated occultist and oculist. The 
first is his business, the second his pleasure. But he 
works the two together with great success. I don't 
know if he quite succeeds in taking in our dear 
Egidia; she is very shrewd, for a woman novelist. 
Andre's theory of ocular practice consists largely of 
the due relation of the state of the eyesight to gen- 
eral health, and thence to hypnotism, do you see? 
People are unkind enough to call him a quack, 



218 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

but I think that very unfair, for he is quite amus- 
ing!" 

Mrs. Elles did not know if St. Jerome was amusing 
or not ; she was sure he was spiteful. She felt that 
his flighty and casual manner suggested some disre- 
spect towards the Lady from the Provinces, but per- 
haps that was London's way? She meant that 
London's way should not by any means astonish or 
perturb her, so she went on calmly. 

"If I were not afraid of your thinking me con- 
ceited, I should say that I think the hypnotist is 
looking at me!" 

"Of course he is. He is trying to mesmerize you. 
That is his little game. He boasts that he can make 
anyone in the world cross the whole length of the 
room to him if he has a mind and yet he lives only 
three floors down, in these very Mansions." 

Mrs. Elles again suspected Mr. St. Jerome of 
making fun of her. 

"I hope he won't care to thoroughly exercise his 
powers just now," she said, "for I am a very impres- 
sionable subject. I might get up, and go to him this 
very minute, and that would be awkward. Intro- 
duce me after dinner, and I will tell him that I 
once wore blue spectacles for a month without 
stopping." 

"That is why your eyes look so bright!" said St. 
Jerome, lightly. As a matter of fact he suspected 
her of taking morphia. 

"Oh, I had a better reason than that!" she said, 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 219 

impatiently. "Tell me, do you know an artist called 
Rivers?" 

"Was he your reason? And a very nice reason 
too!" 

"Mr. St. Jerome, you are chaffing me, and it is 
not fair, as I come from the provinces! Besides," 
she explained, beginning to be terrified at the possible 
consequences of her imprudence, "I hardly know 
Mr. Eivers. I met him here for the first time at 
tea." 

"Of course you did!" 

Mrs. Elles inferred from this speech that Rivers 
was a constant visitor at Egidia's tea-table, which is 
perhaps what St. Jerome intended her to do. She 
was piqued. "I that is we are going to tea with 
him in his studio, one of these days," she remarked. 

"I congratulate you! Rivers is not a quiet tea- 
party man at all, and enjoys the reputation of being a 
misogynist. I have long tried to acquire it in vain. 
Naturally all your sex are devoted to him. He takes 
it very well, I must say, and shows no signs of being 
unduly puffed up. A lady's man sans le savior!" 

"There are a good many people like that!" 
remarked Mrs. Elles, though in her heart of hearts 
she thought there was but one. But she wanted to 
draw the polite and analytical novelist, and lead him 
on to discuss the man she loved. 

"Yes, and all the women adore them, confound it! 
They mistake ; they see the man full of energy and 
spirit, making for a given point in life, and allowing 



220 THE HUMAN INTEREST 



nothing to distract his attention from it, like a horse 
with blinkers on. They naturally want to remove the 
blinkers, and divert a little of that force and energy 
into a more useful channel, i. e., love-making. They 
take no account of the correlation of forces; they 
don't see that what a man gives to one thing he can- 
not give to another, that dominated as he is by an 
abstraction, charming concrete objects" he looked 
at Mrs. Elles "have no chance at all!" 

"You are making Mr. Eivers out a mild kind of 
Robespierre!" 

"Oh, well, I don't go so far as to suppose that he 
would wade through seas of blood to his ambition 
let us say the painting of the most perfect landscape 
in the world; his easel is not a guillotine, and besides, 
he has more or less realized his ambition, he has 
everything he wants, name, and fame, and money, 
and the right to be as misogynistical as he pleases. 
He is no curmudgeon, but he is eminently unsociable. 
I have never even been in his studio myself, for he 
doesn't go in for the vulgarity of a Show Sunday, 
and he is away in the country half the year, pro- 
pitiating the deities of woods and streams. I meet 
him now and then at the Athenseum young women, 
you know, are not admitted there, only bishops and 
so on!" 

"Isn't it a great honour to belong to the Athe- 
naeum?" 

"Yes, especially if you are elected under Rule II. 
Rivers is a great swell. I shouldn't be surprised if 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 221 



they made him President some day that is, if they 
ever make a landscape painter President of the R. A., 
which they have a natural prejudice against doing." 

Rule II. of the Athenaeum Club the limitations of 
landscape painters as Possible Presidents of the Royal 
Academy it was all Greek to Mrs. Elles, but still 
she managed very well. Her eyes sparkled, she was 
gay and sympathetic; the two things that London 
wants. There was no denying it, she was happy here, 
happier than she had ever been, dining in the lonely 
inn with the man of her heart, though she would not 
for worlds have admitted such a truth had she been 
taxed with it. She would have liked Rivers with her 
here; she would have been friends with God and 
Mammon. Love, and the World! Rivers and she 
were true incompatibles ; but that again she would 
not have owned. 

Looking down the table, she sometimes caught 
Egidia's deep-set, serious eyes fixed on her, and 
immediately composed her own face to a decent 
semblance of mental distress, subdued and controlled 
by the dictates of social standards of gaiety. 

Egidia smiled sweetly at her now and then, as a 
mother might at a promising debutante daughter. 
She herself was feeling it an effort to sustain her own 
reputation for brilliancy and repartee. Her spirits 
were so leaden ; she had received such a shock. She 
could think of nothing but the painter's affairs, and 
the crushing blow that was so soon to fall on him. 
Edmund Rivers, a very Galahad of stainless life, a 



222 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

knight sans peur and sans reproche ! The social fall 
of such is always the severer, since the eager hounds 
of envy are so glad of an excuse to worry a name that 
has heretofore stood high. "What though the asper- 
sion was so utterly false, it would be cast all the 
same ; the mud would be flung, and some of it would 
stick. And she who would lay down her life to save 
him a moment's annoyance must endure to look on 
the little enemy of his peace, sitting opposite her, 
careless, irresponsible, drinking in flattery and 
champagne, flashing her bright eyes about, and wav- 
ing the little fluttering hands that held the future of 
a man worth twenty such as she, in the might of his 
art and intellect J 

However, that Phoebe Elles should thoroughly 
enjoy her dinner party was necessary for the further- 
ance of a plan of action that Egidia had conceived 
one of the many plans that she had conceived. The 
better pleased Mrs. Elles was, the better would the 
particular plan work, but though Egidia was an 
authoress, she was human, and presently found her- 
self actually avoiding her guest's laughing eyes. 

Looking round at her own neighbour, she noticed 
the mesmeric eyes of Dr. Andre fixed on her guest, 
and knew that he had singled her out for his partic- 
ular line of experiment. Egidia was "apt now at all 
sorts of treasons and stratagems," and a new idea shot 
through her brain. She was no believer in hypno- 
tism, except in its extraordinary power over a certain 
kind of silly woman, in the way of suggestion. 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 223 

She turned round to Dr. Andr6. 

"I see you are considering the little lady who was 
the occasion of my wild appeal to you to come and 
dine in a hurry. Do you think she would be a good 
subject for hypnotic suggestion?" 

"No." 

"Too clever?" 

"She could never succeed in making her mind a 
blank, I fancy. She thinks all the time nothing 
particularly worth thinking, I daresay. Still, she is 
so pretty, I should like to try. She is not a London 
woman?" 

"How do you know that?" 

"Oh, she is beautifully dressed. It isn't that," he 
said smiling. "The dress may be Paris, but the soul 
is Newcastle." 

Egidia started. "You are really a wonderful man, 
Dr. Andre, or else you have the luck of coincidences !" 

He smiled, with the fatuity of the occultist. 

"You are right, she does come from Newcastle, 
but let me tell you that when I introduce you, you 
will find her quite au fait of all the latest London 
fads. She makes it her business to be. These illus- 
trated papers do a great deal to prepare the provincial 
mind for the more startling developments of our 
civilization. Mrs. Elles has looked on the Medusa 
head of certain aspects of society through the medium 
of 'Black and White,' and the 'Ladies' Field.' " 

"How you hate her!" said Dr. Andre. 

Egidia wore mental sackcloth and ashes for the 



224 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

rest of the evening, conscious that she had for once 
allowed herself to be drawn to the very verge of the 
fathomless gulf of feminine spite. 



"Did I look nice? Did I seem too dreadfully 
provincial?" was what Mrs. Elles said to her hostess 
when the door had closed on the last guest. 

Egidia had sunk into a chair, and sat staring at 
vacancy. Mrs. Elles's voice recalled her from her 
reverie. 

"Not at all I mean provincial. You and the 
Doctor seemed to get on? Did he propose to 
mesmerize you?" 

"Oh, yes!" Mrs. Elles answered eagerly. "Soon. 
May he? Here in your flat?" 

"Certainly!" Egidia replied, feeling now a little 
apprehension of the consequences. "But you must 
not believe in him too much. You must not let him 
get an influence over you!" 

"I shouldn't mind. I am sure he would not use 
his power for harm against me or any woman!" 

"Oh, no, he is a good old thing!" Egidia said 
condescendingly. "And this little social trick of his 
amuses people, and makes him a personage, and 
asked out a great deal!" 

"I believe very much in hypnotism as a serious 
force in life," said the other sturdily. "I can't 
laugh at it. And I think Dr. Andre is a most inter- 
esting man who could give one a real glimpse into 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 225 

one's self and into futurity, if he chose, and one 
turned out to be a good subject." 

"And he thinks you a very pretty woman he told 
me so." 

"Oh pretty!" said Mrs. Elles, as much as to 
imply that she did not wish to stand on anything so 
trivial as good looks in the seer's good opinion. 

"At any rate, you enjoyed yourself?" 

"Enormously! I mean, that I did not want to be 
a blot on your party, so I screwed myself up, and 
was gay!" 

"You mean you were acting a part?" Egidia 
answered, coldly. 

"Well, partly," Mrs. Elles replied; then she added 
with the pretty smile that leavened so many of her 
little insincerities, "but I confess I forgot every 
now and then, and let myself feel as if nothing had 
happened, and I was a girl again, beginning life the 
life I always wanted, the life I was made for, I think. 
Oh, don't you see how hard it all is for me, this 
course I have to take that I must take for his sake?" 

With a comical little twist of the mouth, she went 
on: "Some are born virtuous, some are something 
or other what is it? and some have virtue thrust 
upon them! I know that I must defend this 
wretched case for the sake of other people, but I 
can't help thinking that if Mortimer did win it and 
get his divorce, it would be the very thing for 
me!" 

"I confess I don't understand " 



226 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

"Mr. Rivers would marry me," she said, wist- 
fully, "and then I should live in London!" 

Egidia laughed she could not help it! This, 
then, was the net result of her carefully arranged 
plan for indoctrinating her guest with the pleasures 
of respectability and the advantages of a defined 
social position. 

"My dear woman, forgive me!" she exclaimed. 
"Have you the very remotest notion of what you are 
saying? You cannot have the most elementary 
knowledge of social laws if you imagine that a man 
having married a divorced woman divorced on his 
account could take her out, and expect his friends 
to call on her ! On the contrary, you and he God 
help you both would have to forego all society. 
You would have to live abroad in some shady place, 
and be thankful for the company of blacklegs and 
second-rate women, or else make up your minds to 
live entirely apart from the world. He would not 
mind that ; he is used to it ; but you ! What would 
you do without life, movement, and, above all, con- 
sideration? That is what I was asking myself when I 
looked down the table to-night, and saw you happy 
and gay " 

Mrs. Elles demurred. 

"Well, pretending to be happy and gay though I 
really and truly believe you were. As you have just 
been saying yourself, you were in your element. 
And I thought what a volcano it was that you were 
standing on, and how, if the worst came to pass, how 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 227 

different a life yours would be from this you coyet 
and all the time you were thinking that the very fact 
of your divorce would entitle you to it all! Good 
Heavens! Instead of sitting there, gay and impor- 
tant, admired and attended to, with people taking the 
trouble to mesmerize you and analyze you and take 
your soul to pieces for you, you would be hidden 
away in some little foreign town Boulogne, say? 
cut, snubbed, and penned up for life with no other 
society but that of the man you have dragged down 
along with you, and involved in your ruin, and who 
would end by hating you in consequence." 

Mrs. Elles cried out, outraged. "You forget you 
forget that he proposed to me when he thought I 
was free!" 

"I beg your pardon " Egidia said, vaguely. 

"No, don't beg my pardon, you meant to be kind 

but " She stopped, and her whole manner 

altered as the humiliating suggestion took root in her 
mind. "Tell me you must mean tell me in so 
many words you must mean to say that he never 
really cared for me? For God's sake, speak out!" 

"If you ask me to speak out honestly, then I don't 
think he really did! He is not what is called a 
marrying man. . . . Now you will of course 
never be able to forgive me. . . . Let us both 
go to bed now at any rate I am quite worn out!" 

She turned aside wearily, and passed through the 
portie're, letting her hand drag after her, as she went. 
Mrs. Elles 's vexation at her plain speaking died 



228 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

before a more generous instinct of gratitude to the 
woman who had befriended her in her need. She 
caught hold of the fugitive hand 

"Oh, don't leave me like this; indeed, you are my 
best friend. Thank you, thank you for telling me 
the truth. I ought to know it." 

"It is only my opinion!" said the other, suffering 
herself, however, to be drawn into the room again, by 
the insistent tenderness of her rival, which touched 
her, and made her feel a brute. 

"Yes," Mrs. Elles went on sadly. "Only your 
opinion, but you have known him so very much 
longer than I have." She would have been equal to 
the mental sacrifice of adding, "and so much more 
intimately," but hardly dared, lest it was taken, not 
as a compliment but as an impertinence. "I only 
saw him for a month, and even in that time I could 
not help loving him adoring him. . . . How 
could anyone help it? Could you?" 

"No," Egidia murmured under her breath, too 
much moved to resent the question. 

"It is just those very silent men whom every one 
adores," the other went on. "But he always pre- 
ferred his art to me. I knew it at the time, only I 
was so blinded. Then when he realized that he was 
compromising me, he did the honourable thing, and 
proposed. Of course I don't suppose he thought me 
quite impossible, he felt it would be just bearable to 
be married to me, if he had to be married, but he 
had never meant to be married, as you say. But you 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 229 

must see, that if I come to think that, how very 
much more humiliating it makes it for me how 
painful to have to think that one was only proposed 
to out of pity and a sense of duty!" 

She turned her face away, sobbing. 

Egidia put her arm round her. She could unf eign- 
edly sympathise with the very real sorrows of wounded 
vanity. She felt she had spoken plainly with full 
conviction and honest intent, it was true, but still 
plainly and perhaps brutally. She was conscious that 
her care had been all along for the man, and not the 
woman. 

"My dear, my dear," she said, drawing Mrs. Elles 
close to her, "there is another thing I see that saves 
it a little a good deal, I think!" 

"What?" asked Phoabe Elles. 

"You don't really love him either!" 

"What, not love him?" 

"No, you think you do, you would die for him, of 
course, but you don't love him. You happen to have 
chosen him for an emotional centre, every woman, if 
she is a woman, has to find an emotional centre, but 
she does not always choose well. Edmund, like all 
geniuses, is self-centred without being selfish; you 
understand me ; he is to be regarded as exempt from 
the ordinary responsibilities of humanity, morally and 
otherwise. He is quite willing to be worshipped 
what man is not? but ho has no time to worship, or 
be aux petits soins with anybody. He could not, if 
he liked, make any woman happy, certainly not a 



230 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

passionate woman. She could never exist long in the 
rarefied spiritual atmosphere into which dear Edmund 
would want to lift her, where he lives and flourishes. 
He can feel, of course, the big things, but he has, as 
it were, no small change of emotion at any one's serv- 
ice. And he doesn't, on his side, ask for anything. 
He is sufficient unto himself. Did you not observe, 
when you were with him, how he accepted your devo- 
tion, but made no demands on it!" 

"He let me rub his colours for him!" Mrs. Elles 
said, laughing. 

"Do you mean to say you did not feel the curious 
sense of aloofness, of want of sympathy with poor 
humanity, that the consciousness of a mission even 
an art mission seems to bring with it? Not for 
humanity's woes; no one can be kinder than 
Edmund, if you are in real trouble, but he is the 
kind of man who would never notice if you had cut 
your finger, or had got a new frock on. Now woman 
wants more than that here below at least I think 
so!" 

She laughed, Mrs. Elles was wondering how she 
could talk like this about the man she cared for. 

"I am being very didactic, I fear," Egidia said 
suddenly. "And boring you." 

"No, no," said the other vehemently. "I love 
discussing people. I have noticed all you say in Mr. 

Rivers, but still And do you know," she went 

on eagerly, "all the men who speak of him seem very 
fond of him, so is it only women he snubs?" 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 231 

"Oh, men like him and respect him, bat they 
don't slap him on the back, and confide their pleas- 
ant weaknesses to him ! He is manly enough, but I 
don't know how it is, he is quite out of it in the 
smoking-room. " 

"He is very much at home in a woman's boudoir, 
at all events!" said Mrs. Elles, a little bitterly. 

"You mean mine," the other replied with her 
usual directness. "Well, he is my cousin, and he 
knows I like to hear him discuss the only subject he 
cares to discuss art. He tells me his ideas for new 
mediums and the experiments he is making. He 
laments the volatility of the prettiest colours, such as 
aureoline, and the impracticability of Nature as a 
model. We never talk of anything more personal 
than that, and all he condescends to look at here ia a 
sunset over Westminster as we see it from my win- 
dows." 

"Do you like that sort of subject best yourself?" 
Mrs. Elles said wistfully, going out of herself for 
once, into the other woman's mind, and realizing the 
bitterness of renunciation that informed the words so 
laughingly spoken. 

"Oh, I well, I am a woman, and no wiser than 
the rest. That is why I have been telling you all 
this, because if you once realize that I have been 
there myself, in short you will more readily let me 
help you and him. You see, though I am hopeless 
absolutely hopeless" Mrs. Elles stared; this 
strange woman might have been talking about cooks, 



232 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

for all the emotion she showed "I am not even 
miserable about it. I know so well that if Edmund 
came to me and went down on his knees to me to 
marry him, I should refuse, he could not make me as 
happy as he makes me now. If I were a wife, I 
should not care to be second to anything, not even to 
Art, nor would you. I have realized the finality of it 
all, and so must you. But now, you must trust me, 
ploase, and not think, when I talk to you of your 
affairs and Edmund's, that I am fighting for my own 
hand, and mean to secure him for myself, in the end, 
as soon as I have helped him to get clear of his 
entanglement with you. You see I speak quite 
plainly.'* 

Mrs. Elles's eager disclaimer of any such interpre- 
tation of Egidia's behaviour was not so much the 
outcome of an emotional confidence in the woman 
who had so bravely, so wildly, so foolishly committed 
herself, as of the strong conviction which her words 
carried. She was secretly a little overcome and 
puzzled by the spectacle of so much single-minded- 
ness and bonhomie in the unveiling of a soul's 
tragedy, such as she conceived Egidia's to be. She 
herself could not have been anything but tortuous in 
the telling of such a piece of secret history. The 
novelist's methods were not hers. They went with 
the whole character of the woman, with the honest 
eyes, and shrewd, fine, but uncompromising mouth. 



CHAPTER XIII 

Egidia used her novelist's privilege of supposed 
social emancipation sometimes, and braved conven- 
tionalities. She went once or twice to see her 
cousin in his studio. It was obviously impossible for 
her to receive him in her own house, while Mrs. Elles 
was an inmate of it. 

Mrs. Elles had now been her guest for some 
months. She had written at the outset, in obedience 
to Egidia's instructions, a letter to her husband, long 
and reasonable, announcing her present whereabouts, 
and laying the circumstances and facts of her stay in 
Yorkshire fully before him. His only reply to her 
had been a curt communication through his lawyers, 
informing her that he was determined to proceed with 
the case, and would even consent to defray the cost 
of her defence by a suitable firm of London solicitors, 
whose name and address he mentioned. 

"He pays to get rid of me!" Mrs. Elles had com- 
mented bitterly. She had up to the last moment 
believed in the existence in Mortimer's heart of a 
latent love for her. She was a woman before whom 
every man must necessarily bow the knee, even her 
husband. She was now a little disillusioned. 

"Such a man should be glad to have such a wife as 
233 



234 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

me, on any terms!" she observed to Egidia. "It is 
worse than quarrelling with one's bread and butter; 
it is quarrelling with one's culture, as well!" 

But it was painfully obvious that Mortimer Elles 
did not now set so high a value on the Muse who had 
for ten years honoured his fireside. 

These were the things that amused Egidia, and 
indemnified her for the trial of housing the delin- 
quent, and being the recipient of her oft repeated 
confidences. She always thought, and spoke to 
Eivers, of Phoabe Elles as of a wayward foolish child, 
whose material interests they both had at heart, and 
of the impending divorce case as of a mere legal and 
technical difficulty into which the indiscretion and 
imprudence of this particular child had plunged her- 
self, and her friends. 

"Pooh!" she said to Eivers, in an off-hand manner 
that was half assumed. "You don't know what 
Love is, either of you! She talks of it, and you 
don't, but you are both alike!" 

Eivers still used his old habit, the one Mrs. Elles 
had noticed, and suffered from, that of refusing to 
take up other persons' speeches unless positively 
called upon to do so. He was working now against 
time, standing intent, mahl-stick and palette in hand, 
under the pale white globe of electric light, which 
dimly lit the whole vast studio, and concentrated 
itself upon his head, that was not so dark as it used 
to be. 

"The little fiend! She has managed to turn his 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 235 



hair grey!" Egidia said to herself as she stood near 
him, but not near enough to interfere with the free 
play of his brush-arm, and talked softly, and in a way 
calculated to make no direct demand on his attention. 
Mrs. Elles had learned that art, too, in the glades of 
Brignal. Eivers never looked round at Egidia, but 
continued to lay on touch after touch with unerring 
precision and mastery. He now and then stepped 
back a few paces, and glanced at her, just enough to 
avoid jostling her in his backward walk, but that was 
all. 

"Do you like Dr. Andre?" she asked suddenly. 

"Yes, well enough why?" 

"Because I think he admires Phoebe!" 

"Does he?" was the indifferent reply. 

"She is probably with him now or at her 
lawyer's." 

Egidia spoke tentatively, as if she were consulting 
him as to her own line in countenancing the intimacy 
between the two. Perhaps a desire to ascertain 
Rivers' own personal feelings on the subject of the 
little flirtation unconsciously influenced her. 

"There is no harm in Andre," said Eivers decid- 
edly. "And, poor little thing, it does her good to be 
taken out of herself!" 

"Nothing ever really does that!" Egidia rejoined. 
Inwardly she said, "Oh, no, he can't care for her." 
And her face, unconsciously to herself, took on a joy- 
oua expression. She went on, with a manner of 
detached criticism : 



236 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

"I never, in all my literary life, met any one who 
lived in herself so completely. Keats speaks of a 
woman who would have liked to have been engaged 
to a poem and married to a novel, but Phoebe goes 
one better, she is her own poem, her own novel. No 
spectacle, no literature in the world interests her as 
much. She is always pulling herself up by the roots, 
as it were, to account for her moral or immoral 
growth, and telling one all about it." 

"And does it bore you?" asked he. 

"On the contrary, it interests me deeply. And to 
do her justice, she is a charming companion, so gay, 
so lively. No one would imagine what she is suffer- 
ing. The Merry Martyr, I call her." There was the 
very slightest touch of mockery in her tone. 

He made no remark, and she continued : 

"I gave her that drawing you gave me the one 
that had a sketch of her in it. She did want it 
so badly, poor girl, and after all, she sat for it, and 
had a better right to it than I !" 

"I will give you another!" said Rivers. 

"Will you really, Edmund? That is nice of you." 
She flushed with pleasure. "Now I must go back to 
my young woman of the sea!" She laughed. 

"Be kind to her!" said Rivers, "but you are, I 
know. You are a good woman !" 

"Am I? But I get very angry with the lady some- 
times, when she talks as if this divorce of hera was a 
sort of smart tea-party she was going to in the imme- 
diate future. " 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 23? 

"But that is the right way to look at it," said he, 
"and a tea party that won't come off either!" 

Egidia stared at him ; she wondered if this was the 
flippancy of bitterness or indifference? 

"They won't be able to prove what is not true," 
the artist went on, with some fire, but at the same 
time carefully laying and mixing burnt umber and 
madder brown on his palette. "There isn't really 
the ghost of a case, as I told the old woman, her 
aunt, when she came and made me a scene. It will 
be all right. Elles will abandon the charge, or we 
will get it squared out of court. It isn't worth think- 
ing about." 

He applied the mixture he had made with a firm 
square touch. 

"Oh, I see," said Egidia, "that is why you are 
able to paint away so composedly ! I was wondering 
I had thought that in the face of such a possible 
horror you would have not been able to do anything. 
That is why I have distressed myself so much about it 
all. Are you sure you are not pretending that you 
are not more disturbed than you care to own?" 

"I don't let it trouble me," he said, adding with a 
certain intentional deliberation, "I am an artist 
before all!" 

Egidia said she must go home. Rivers unyoked his 
palette from his thumb, and laid it down carefully. 
He led her out of the studio, downstairs, past walls 
covered with framed diplomas, and medals, and all 
kinds of memoranda of a life spent in the service and 



238 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

honor of Art. His house in Bedford Square was pre- 
eminently a bachelor's house; an indurated, deeply 
ingrained celibacy was suggested by the presence of 
many articles of furniture, and the absence of others. 
Rivers was of the orderly description of bachelor, of 
all kinds the most inveterate. Egidia, in her mind's 
eye, could not see the little Elles throning it here, 
her trivial prettiness overwhelmed by the grandiose 
style of decoration appropriate to the mansions of 
Bloomsbury, her eyes resting on high wall spaces 
hung with old masters, her footsteps treading stair- 
cases whose angles were filled with yellow casts of 
heroic statues. There was never a bit of drapery, or 
a Tanagra figurine to reduce the scale a little. It 
was all the difference between the atmosphere of the 
British Museum, and a Louis Seize Boudoir. Egidia 
felt happier at the definition of this anomaly between 
the tastes of Rivers and Phosbe, and went away hav- 
ing absorbed some of the contagion of Rivers' confi- 
dence in a renewed term of celibacy for himself. 

Mrs. Elles had not yet returned when she got home, 
but came fluttering in presently, and touched her 
shoulder as she sat over the fire shivering with the 
chill depression of thoughts that would rise, in spite 
of the consoling visit she had just made. 

"Cheer up!" said Sirs. Elles. "I have brought 
you a little present, nothing particular, only to show 
that I love you. A little gold lucky bean. Will you 
wear it to please me?" 

She sank down on the hearthrug, and laid her 



THE HUMAN INTEKEST 239 

hand, and for the moment her head, on Egidia's 
knee. This was one of her "caressing little ways," 
to which Egidia was ashamed of objecting. 

"Where have you been?" she said coldly. "With 
the Doctor or the Lawyer?" 

"Lawyer. Eight away down to Holborn. Of 
course, I got there too soon. I generally do. I am 
so eager to hear what fresh news they have. A 
divorce case is so exciting. But then I have to wait, 
in the lobby, among all that barren brownness of 
cheap varnish, and trodden oilcloth and japanned tin 
deed boxes stacked up to the very horizon. There I 
am on one of an awful row of bulging leather chairs, 
where the crowd of witnesses sit I mean the grimy 
people that keep coming in, wiping their cuffs across 
their mouths, and sit down apologetically. They are 
to be examined in this or that disgusting case, as 
Jane Anne will be in mine. I watch the com- 
missionaire adding up figures inside his queer hutch 
of a desk, and read up all about Salmon-Fishery Laws 
on the walls and see the little bow-legged clerks hop 
off their stools, and run about with sheaves of papers. 
Why can't they make lawyers' offices prettier?" 

"Divorce," said Egidia, "would really become too 
attractive if it were run in connection with a restau- 
rant or a manicure establishment. " 

"And then," Mrs. Elles went on, "when I do see 
Mr. Lawler, I cannot help thinking that he is laugh- 
ing at me. He treats me like a child " 

"Instead of an erring woman!" said Egidia. 



240 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

"Well, you should not wear your hats so terribly on 
one side. The dignity of crime " 

"Yes, I must really get something plainer!" Mrs. 
Elles returned, taking her literally. "I nearly cried 
to-day, and it did not go with my hat at all." 

"Why did you cry?" 

"Because I can stand a good deal but when he 
repeated all the awful things that woman was pre- 
pared to swear against me, I nearly gave way. The 
whole case, they say, stands on her evidence, and it is 
false, outrageously false. She always hated me, she 
cared for Mr. Kivers herself. It was notorious that 
she did." 

Egidia sneered a little, almost in spite of herself. 
"Who next?" she said. 

"She was very nearly a lady," Mrs. Elles said 
apologetically, "and he was kind to her, but he never 
flirted with her of that I am convinced. But if the 
jury believe her, Mortimer will get his case, to a 
certainty!" 

"Did they tell you the details of what she was 
going to say?" asked Egidia, shyly and awkwardly. 

Mrs. Elles told her, at some length, but without 
much hesitation. 

"Oh, she can't realize!" thought Egidia, brooding. 
"She can have no imagination!" 

Her own conjured up so vividly the horrors of the 
scene in court the scene that must come now, in 
spite of Rivers' pathetically confident assertions. 

"She can't love him, or know or care one little bit 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 241 

what he suffers or is it that she thinks that she will 
get him herself in the end? And so she will, for he is 
a man of honour. Ah, but she shall not, if I can 
prevent it. It will be the best plot I ever invented, 
if I can pull it through, and then I suppose I must 
take the veil, to show the purity of my intentions ! 

. . God forgive me, if he loves her! But he 
does not ! . . . He is an artist before all. He 
said so himself, this very day. And no man loves 
disgrace, and such disgrace would kill love, if ever it 
existed!" 

"What are you thinking of?" asked the other pres- 
ently. "You look like the tragic muse, or Althea, 
before she put the burning brand back into the fire 
again. You have a very strong face, do you know? 
It is a pity Mr. Rivers isn't a figure painter, then he 
could paint you." 

"I wish somehow you would not talk of Mr. 
Rivers." 

"Why not? I am always thinking of him." 

"That you are not." 

"You think me very frivolous?" Mrs. Elles sighed 
out. "But I only laugh that I may not weep I go 
about trying to kill thought. If I did not, I should 
go mad with what is hanging over me! And the 
worst I have to bear almost is the thought that 
though I am thinking so constantly of him, he is not 
thinking of me except as a disagreeable incident a 
burr that has somehow got stuck to him, and that he 
cannot shake off!" She got up and walked about a 



242 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

little, evidently a prey to real mental perturbation. 
Then she turned suddenly. 

"Egidia, I want you and him if possible to know 
this, that I shall not marry him, even if I am di- 
vorced for him. I could not, after what you said." 

She spoke pettishly, like a child or a schoolgirl, 
but all the strength and sadness of renunciation was 
in her eyes. She evidently meant what she said. 
Egidia realised this, but the complication of her 
feelings about this little Helen kept her silent awhile. 
She took her hand, however, and held it, in sign of 
amity. 

"I want, Phcabe," she said presently, "to go out of 
town for two or three days. Do you think, if I did, 
that you could amuse yourself and keep out of 
mischief?" 

"You speak to me as if I was ten!" Mrs. Elles 
said. "I am not sure if I mind? What is mischief?" 

"Oh, you know things that might prejudice you 
in your new position. I need not mention them 
you know the kind of thing?" 

"Can I go to see the Rembrandts with Dr. Andre?" 

"The poor man's in love with you but there 
would be no harm in your going to the Rembrandts 
with him, I think," Egidia answered easily. 

By ten o'clock of the next day she was gone. 

Mrs. Elles felt a really irresistible impulse, to do 
what she did. "It was as if something called me!" 
she said afterwards. "I felt that I had to see him." 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 243 

So two days after the day on which her friend had 
left London, the dreary gas lamps of Bedford Square 
fluttered, and the black mud shone prismatically 
under the feet of a little woman, wandering without 
judgment or system, round and round the square, 
enquiring of nodding applewomen, of burly police- 
men, of scurrying street arabs, and honouring them 
all with the gracious smile of drawing rooms, the 
way to No. 99 in that region. 

"Why, there, Missie, under yer nose," said the 
last of the policemen, pointing to the number, written 
black and jagged over the fanlight of the house near 
whose very doorstep she was standing. He thought 
the young lady a little touched in the head; there 
was indeed a wild look in her eyes, born of the con- 
sciousness of her own audacity, and the wild joy of 
seeing Rivers again. 

She rang the bell, and a grim, demure -looking 
Scotch servant Eivers' staid old housekeeper, of 
whom she had often heard answered it. 

"Can I see Mr. Rivers?" she asked. 

"Mr. Rivers doesn't paint figures, Miss," said the 
woman kindly, and with the manner of one deliver- 
ing an oft repeated statement. "But Mr. Brandard, 
over the other side of the Square, is always glad for 
us to send models over to him." 

'I am not a model," said Mrs. Elles, vexed and 
ashamed. "Here is my card. Will you take it to 
Mr. Rivers, and ask if he will see me?" 

The perfectly civil Scotchwoman took it, with a 



244 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

blank neutral face. She showed the visitor into a 
half vestibule, half room, on one side of the passage. 
It was perfectly ordered and arranged, there were 
no landscapes on its walls it was, she knew, a fad of 
the painter's not to hang his own pictures. There 
were other people's pictures, etchings, engravings, 
with flattering inscriptions, "A mon ami a mon 
confrere hommages" signed with some of the great- 
est names in the land. A sense of the worldly 
importance of this man whom she was going to drag 
through seas of disreputability grew in her mind, 
and affected her more deeply than Egidia's hints and 
lectures had done. She was literally a burr hanging 
on this great name, and she ought to kill herself 
sooner than let herself be associated with it in men's 
minds. It was then that the idea of suicide first 
came to her. 

The servant came back. 

"Air. Rivers is very sorry indeed, Ma'am, but he is 
not able to see any one to-day." 

"He " Her lips trembled; her whole body 

shook at the blow. She turned, lest the woman saw 
her face. 

"Is there any message I can give, Madam?" 

"No, thank you, no message," she answered, with 
her face still averted, and drifting out into the street. 

She leant against the palings of the Square, and 
sobbed. Was it love, or vanity or shock? 

"How brutal how brutal!" she repeated to her- 
self. 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 245 

The policeman on his beat turned his bull's eye on 
to her. 

"Are you going to tell me to move on?" she asked 
him, plaintively. 

"No, Madam," he replied, and she was a little 
assuaged. At least he saw that she was a lady. She 
dried her eyes, and crossed back to the pavement, 
and down a side street. As she passed a little 
postern-like door in the wall Rivers' happened to be 
a corner house it opened, and the artist came out. 
He still had her card in his hand. 

They stood and faced each other. 

"Oh, my God, how ill you look!" she exclaimed, 
"and it is all my fault. Won't you even give me 
your hand?" 

"Are you mad?" he said, contemporaneously with 
her speech. "Good God! was there ever a more 
idiotic thing for a woman in your position to do?" 

He seized her arm, almost roughly, and led her 
away from the door. 

"What are you going to do with me?" 

"Put you in a cab, of course! You must not be 
seen here with me, on any account. I could hardly 
believe my eyes when your card was put into my 
hands." 

So saying, he tore it across with a rancour that 
pierced her heart. 

"You are most unkind!" she complained, follow- 
ing him in his great angry strides down the street, 
"and unnecessary. It is quite dark, no one could see 



246 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

me, or recognise me, and I do so want to talk to you. 
If you must take a hansom, choose one without a 
lamp. Egidia is away, for two days. I don't know 
where she has gone. I felt I must see you, do you 
hear? It is a month since I have been in London a 
month of agony. . . . Did you hail it?" she 
asked nervously, as a cab drew up along the kerb- 
stone. 

She put her hand appealingly on his arm. 

"I won't get in, unless you promise to come with 
me, so far. I must I must talk to you." 

"You are behaving like a child." 

"I know I am," she said, "only because you are 
behaving like a " 

What was she going to say? She did not know 
herself, only that a crushing sense of estrangement, of 
inevitableness, had come over her; the prop of an 
unacknowledged hope that had stayed her for so 
many weeks had been rudely withdrawn. The man 
she loved was a stranger ; she had surely never lived 
at his side, day in, day out, through the summer that 
was past? A wave of despair overwhelmed her, black 
as the mud she looked down on, as she stood, her 
foot on the step, prepared to abandon her point, and 
go back alone. 

But she had gained it. 

"Anything sooner than a scene in the street!" she 
heard Eivers say wearily to himself, as he got in 
beside her. 

"How cruel you are how inconsiderate! Surely 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 247 

I have the right to a few words with you ! I will 
never perhaps speak to you again in this world!" 

He sat, stiff in his closely-buttoned overcoat, like 
a statue beside her, and spoke no word. 

She took his hand, as it lay on his knee. 

"Forgive me do forgive me! I am so sorry so 
dreadfully sorry!" 

"What for?" he said, gently. 

"For bringing this on you this this disgrace. 
And you cannot forgive me, that is just it. I 
realised it when you refused to see me just now, and 
sent me a message by a servant." 

"I had to. Think, yourself! You must really 
not be so unreasonable!" 

"I am reasonable quite, quite reasonable; and 
saying good-bye to you, if you only would let me! 
Yes, you never cared for me much, and now the little 
ghost of love is laid forever. This threatened dis- 
grace and exposure has killed it. But it was there 
don't take that from me a little love, and the rest of 
it pity. Egidia says so, and I believe her. . . . 
Stop, stop, I am not asking you to say anything I 
had rather you did not protest. . . . Oh, look 
at that great red Bovril sign flaring out ! It looks as 
if the whole street was on fire. It must frighten the 
horses. . . ." 

Her voice broke into a sob of hysterical terror. 

"Dear " began Eivers, clasping her hand more 

tightly. 

"How nice of you! It hardly sounds at all per- 



248 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

functory! And yet I know it is. Don't try any 
more. Let me tell you that I don't mind this for 
myself, but only for you, and I mean to defend 
myself tooth and nail, only for your sake. I know 
what it means for yon. If Mortimer and his paid 
accomplices can succeed in lying me away from him, 
then the world will expect you to marry me." 

"Yes," he said, "and I will!" 

u Ah, but it takes two! "she replied, in tragic 
accents. "You can't marry me against my will. 
Supposing I am not there?" 

He allowed the usual empty threat of suicide to 
pass unheeded. 

"I shall ask you to, at any rate," he said, doggedly. 

"Oh, yes, you will ask me!" She was playing so 
well that she almost enjoyed it. "Oh, yes, you will 
ask me, because you are a man of honour and I 
shall refuse, because I am a woman of honour. I 
will not be behind Egidia, whom you respect, in that. 
You are right. She is strong and good. And she 
loves you." 

"Please don't." 

"Surely you and I have no need to mince words? 
She loves you, and if you marry any one, it ought to 
be Egidia. She is devoted, she is an angel, and she 
would rather see you dead at her feet, than married 
tome!" 

She never looked round, or she would perhaps have 
realised the exquisite annoyance she was inflicting on 
her helpless victim, penned up as he was beside her, 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 249 

powerless to prevent or avoid the stream of tactless 
heroics she was pouring on him. His forehead was 
contracted, his hands were clenched together over the 
doors of the cab. 

"We are coming to the more crowded streets now," 
he said suddenly, "and it is really very dangerous for 
you to be seen with me. Had you not better let me 
get out, and leave you to go the rest of the way alone?" 

She replied, with desperate and intentional 
incisiveness, "I permit you to leave me, since you 
wish it." 

He put up his arm, and raised the trap door. 
Mrs. Elles raised her hand to intercept his, but let it 
fall hopelessly down again, on a glance at his set 
face. The cab stopped and he got out, and standing 
half on the pavement, and half on the foot-board 
of the cab, held out his hand. 

"Good-bye!" he said, "for the present!" 

The reservation was kind in intention, but she 
would not accept it. 

"Good-bye forever!" was her answer, as her 
hand, gloveless, out of her muff, went forth to meet 
his. 

"How cold you are!" he said, as he took it. "I 
am sorry. But it is better I should leave you now, 
isn't it? Forgive me for being such a bear, but I 
have to think for both. I will write if I may?" 

"You needn't," she whispered, retreating to the 
corner of the cab, like a wounded animal. "Tell 
him to go on!" 



250 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

"Is there anywhere you can tell him to go some 
shop and then discharge him and take a new one? 
It would be safer!" 

"Tell him to go to the New Gallery!" she said, 
defiantly, and Rivera accordingly did so, and left her. 



CHAPTEK XIV 

DP. Andre 1 was waiting for her in the dim-lighted 
halls of the New Gallery, where large-eyed solemn- 
faced women, some of them so like Egidia, as she 
thought, looked down from the walls on Mrs. Elles in 
her somewhat elf-like prettiness, as of a picture by 
Tissot. All she had in common with them, was her 
large wide-open eyes, eyes without depth or mystery, 
and with unresting lids that had perhaps never 
drooped to hide an emotion worth the name, or a 
secret worth the keeping. 

"I was afraid you were not coming after all!" the 
hypnotist said, in his soft, authoritative voice. 

She sank on to a red leather causeuse, and blinked 
pathetically. 

"Don't speak to me for a moment!" she whispered, 
throwing back her head and turning her profile only 
towards him. 

"You have a headache?" Dr. Andre asked 
sympathetically. 

She shook her head, and in that nugatory shake 
strove to indicate the region of her heart, as the seat 
of her uneasiness. He had the tact to hold his 
tongue, and presently she remarked, with a little 
sigh, "What nice pictures!" as a hint that conversa- 
tion might begin. 

251 



252 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

"You don't care about pictures to-day," he said, 
laughing. "You are terribly upset, I can see. 
Have you had bad news? Have you been fighting 
with wild beasts at Ephesus?" 

She was pleased at his way of putting things. He 
was alluding to her interviews with lawyers : of the 
circumstances in which she found herself he was now 
quite au fait. 

"Wild beasts!" she said. "Well, not quite that, 
but people are very odd, and never behave exactly 
as one has a right to expect them to?" Her accent 
was slightly interrogative. 

"Most men will bully a woman if they get a 
chance!" said he, looking at her keenly. 

The butterfly did look a little crushed, a little 
subdued, as if she had only very recently been 
brought face to face with some of the crude realities 
of life of which she was always talking. 

"But it is against all my theories," he continued. 

"I believe in people too much," she went on. 
"And the consequence is, I give myself away, and 
make a fool of myself." 

"You don't say so?" said Dr. Andre, politely, and 
tenderly. 

He was not one who looked for wisdom in women ; 
it was on charm that he insisted. He admired Mrs. 
Elles extremely. She reminded him of Heine's 
famous definition of a latter-day Venus "a cross 
between a dressmaker and a duchess." The little 
touch of red on her cheek that was not rouge, but 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 253 



which gave her the faintly meretricious air beloved of 
decadents, pleased him; her large eyes, fuller at this 
moment of tears than of expression, were bent on him 
sadly and consciously appealing. By what art she 
avoided the vulgar catastrophe of falling tear-drops 
he did not know, but the brilliant result he could 
fully appreciate. He was a poseur himself, and her 
assumption of pose on his account flattered him. 

"I wish I could help you," he said, wondering if 
he would dare to take the little white hand stiff with 
rings that lay ungloved on the red-covered ottoman 
beside him. "Dare" was not the word Andr6 was 
a determined flirt, and would dare most things, but 
would it be advisable? He cared for her enough not 
to want to frighten her. 

"Yon know I would do anything for you!" he 
confined himself to saying, and in spite of himself 
there was the strongest ring of sincerity in his voice. 

"I know you would," Mrs. Elles replied with 
pretty assurance. She knew that though he imagined 
he was only flirting, he was more nearly loving than 
he was himself aware. That was the way she liked it 
best ; if he were to begin to think himself serious, he 
would begin to be tiresome, and she would have to 
discourage and snub him, and "see less" of him, as 
the phrase is. She did not want to lose him. Her 
intercourse with the distinguished hypnotist had 
acted as a derivative during this troublous period of 
her life. She hardly realized his uses, in that 
capacity, but Egidia did, and set no impediments in 



254 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

the way of their frequent meetings. Phcebo was a 
fool, but Dr. Andre was a gentleman. 

After having been scolded and bullied, as Mrs. 
Elles conceived herself to have been, by her ascetic 
and frigid lover for the last hour, it was sweet to be 
sympathized with, respectfully petted, and made of 
much account by Dr. Andre, who was willing to act 
as a souffre douleur. And though he was not nearly 
so handsome as Edmund Rivers, yet his face had a 
great deal more expression. Though his eyes were 
not deep like Rivers', they were mesmeric. His soul 
was willing, nay anxious, to go forth to meet hers; it 
did not, like that of Rivers, obstinately remain hid 
in its fastnesses of reserve, to baffle and disappoint 
her, who was always on the look-out for the evidences 
of spiritual and intellectual communion. 

She rose from the ottoman, giving herself a little 
shake. She tried to imagine herself in a world that 
knew not Rivers, or Egidia, or Mortimer. They 
were not here, what had they to do with her? Did 
they live? Her senses were not aware of them. Why 
then should she take them into account? "What was 
this thing that was troubling her? Had she any 
present evidence of its existence? Did it exist, 
then? 

Trying to solve this intense problem in meta- 
physics, she went round the Gallery with her accom- 
modating cicerone, who kept up a running 
commentary of wise, witty, and educational remarks, 
without, however, in the least expecting her to take 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 255 

in or appreciate them. He knew exactly the kind of 
woman with whom he had to deal. 

Suddenly they came on a representation of the 
Parcae, three dreary, terrible old women sitting 
huddled up in a cowering circle, weaving, shaping 
and cutting the thread of the destinies of men. Mrs. 
Elles stopped and pondered deeply. There was a 
thread, yes, and many destinies were interwoven with 
the one. No man or woman stood alone. She had 
given a promise that had not been accepted, that 
day, but still she had made it ; she had promised to 
cut the thread of her own life, so as to leave that of 
Rivers free. It was all very well: she stood there 
ostensibly her own mistress in that room, beside Dr. 
Andre, but the thread of her fate was hopelessly 
entangled with the fates of two other persons, her 
husband and her lover. The divorce hung imminent 
over their heads, the machinery of which they had 
set in motion, and which now could not be averted. 

She turned to Dr. Andre, and looked mysterious. 

"Shall I tell you what had always been one of my 
nightmares a suicide manque ! If a person wishes 
to commit suicide, he should arrange to do it neatly 
and completely. Instead of that, he contrives to 
make it a hideous and ridiculous fiasco, and generally 
goes on humbly living after all!" 

"Because intending suicides have as a rule got 
themselves worked up to such a state of nerves before 
they think of killing themselves, that having decided 
on it they are not fit to conduct such a ticklish enter- 



256 THE HUMAN INTEREST 



prise. They are so agitated, so upset, they are in 
such a hurry to get out of the world, when once they 
have screwed themselves up to the point of resolution, 
that lest that resolution waver, they rush it, and so 
muff the whole thing!" 

"Yes, but what I mean is that if I wore perfectly 
calm and not in the least agitated, I should still 
'muff' it, as you say, through not knowing how to set 
about it the mere technique of the business would 
escape me!" 

"I shall have to publish a little manual, at your 
service, 'Suicide Made Easy!' " 

"You must not make fun of me. I am serious." 

"I deeply regret to hear it!" he said, still laughing. 

"No, but don't you know to a nervous woman 
like me, it would be an immense consolation to know 
that I could, at a given moment, get out of it I 
mean life decently and in order." 

"If you must go, why stand upon the order of 
your going?" 

"But that's just it. I should hate to do it 
clumsily, ungracefully, grotesquely. I believe certain 
poisons make you die quite hideously !" She shivered. 

"Nearly all!" he said, teasing her. "But I might 
mesmerise you and never wake you up again!" 

"You are just as unkind and unsympathetic as the 
others!" Mrs. Elles exclaimed, pettishly. "Let us 
go home." 

"Must we?" he said. 

"Even if I didn't want to," she said, "they want 



THE HUMAN INTEKEST 257 

to be rid of us. Look, they are putting out some of 
the lights!" 

"That is nothing. You want to punish me!'* 

"Oh, no, I am not cross with you. I only am 
disappointed in you," she replied, wearily. "You 
can see me home if you like. I want to walk, it 
might drive my headache away." 

"I shall be delighted. Besides, as we live in the 
same house or block my way is yours, in a literal 
sense, at any rate." He led the way to the door, 
and got her her umbrella. "I live so near," he went 
on, as they turned down Eegent Street, "that when 
the burden of life becomes really too hard to bear, you 
can send for me to come in and turn you off neatly." 

"I hate that word 'neatly'!" was all she vouch- 
safed to reply. He spoke of other things and she 
answered absently and jerkily. As they drew near 
Westminster, she said, looking up at him: 

"I do wish you would trust me!" 

"Of course I do trust you, in what may I ask?" 

"You might trust me not to use anything you might 
give me. I should just keep it by me, the means of 
Death, as a man keeps a sleeping draught by his 
bedside, and the knowledge that one can put an end 
to wakefulness at any moment makes it possible to 
stand it, don't you see? I could bear my awful life 
better oh, so much better if I knew I could get 
out of it at any moment ! But nobody understands 
me no not even you." 

The accent she contrived to throw on the last 



258 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

words touched him a little. He looked at her keenly 
but said nothing, and she continued defiantly : 

"Well, if I am left to my own devices, there's 
always the six chemists, and a fourpenny worth of 
laudanum at each! Oh, I know what one does. 
I've read novels." 

"Too many! They are such a perversion of real 
life. Well, I will see what I can do," he said slowly. 

She turned and caught hold of his hand. 

"You can put it in an envelope, and seal it with/ 
black sealing wax ! It will be a bottle, won't it? A 
tiny bottle?" 

"I shall put it in one of those little Venetian tear 
bottles," Dr. Andre said, smiling. "It will be what 
Browning calls 'a delicate death.' But" his tone 
was as serious now as she could wish, "you must promise 
me faithfully not to use it ever ! I should be your 
murderer, do you know? Do you want to hang me?" 

She promised, smiling at his simplicity. She took 
his hand more than cordially in the lift that stopped, 
and deposited him, on a lower floor than hers. 

"Is it possible that a magnetical rapport can be 
established between a man and a woman who loves 
another man?" she thought. "That would explain. 
At any rate he is kind to me far, far kinder than 
Edmund." 

She dined alone and cried. Late that night a tiny 
little parcel was sent up to her from Dr. Andre. She 
shivered when she looked at it, and locked it up 
under two keys. 



CHAPTER XV 

Egidia got out of the train at Barnard Castle, as 
Mrs. Elles had done, months before. She took a fly, 
and drove four miles to Greta Bridge. 

She knew every inch of the ground from the 
description which Rivers and Phoebe had at different 
times given her of it. 

She was full of purpose. Jane Anne Cawthorne 
was the worst enemy of the two that she had taken 
under her protection Jane Anne Cawthorne was pre- 
pared to swear falsely Jane Anne Cawthorne 'a 
mouth must be stopped. 

Egidia thought she could do it, fairly and squarely, 
and without this girl's evidence, so she gathered 
from the lawyers, the case against Rivers and Phoebe 
would fall to the ground. 

It was Jane Anne Cawthorne herself who came 
forward civilly when she alighted at the door of 
"Heather Bell," and asked for rooms. Egidia was 
as urbane in manner as she could be towards the 
woman who cared for Rivers, and was yet prepared to 
testify falsely concerning him. 

"A low type!" she thought to herself, "a potential 
villain, but still susceptible to moral influences. 
They have bribed her, but all the same, she is doing 

259 



260 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

this thing par depit amoureux. Therefore an apt 
subject for diplomacy. How low I feel! But if I 
can only get him out of this, I don't care what I do." 

She secured the very sitting-room that Rivera and 
Mrs. Elles had shared together, and derived a melan- 
choly pleasure from the idea that it was so. There 
was the very rose-strewn table-cover, stained and 
splashed with the dabbling of the artist's brush; there 
was the piano on which Mrs. Ellea had played to him. 
But outside, in the wintry garden, the dark dank 
earth lay heavy upon all the flowers and verdure that 
had gladdened the eyes of the lovers. For in spite of 
Phoebe's frivolity and Edmund's asceticism, she 
could read through Phoebe's admissions and falsifica- 
tions, that for a brief space they had been lovers the 
woman in her had been genuinely stirred, the man in 
him. It had not lasted, but it had been. But now 
it was winter, "the days dividing lover and lover, the 
light that loses, the night that wins," the season 
when no man can paint, and loves that are ephem- 
eral die down and are buried under the wrack of 
autumn. There was no frost as yet, the December 
air was mild and subdued, with only a prescience as 
it were of the snows and disasters of January. 

Egidia made a sad little pilgrimage to the scenes of 
this romance that grieved her so. Brignal Banks 
under their winter aspect reminded her somehow of 
a young and pretty woman after a long and devastat- 
ing illness. It was the same, and not the same, the 
warm tones had gone out of the green, the ragged 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 261 

boughs seemed blotted in upon the sky ; the moist 
sides of the cliff, that no glow of sunset irradiated 
now, showed hard and chill behind the streaky lines 
of the leafless creepers that still hung on them. The 
water still bubbled and splashed over the stones, but 
with an empty merriment. So it seemed to the sad 
woman who stood by the river bank and looked at the 
bridge of stones made by human labour, that was no 
longer continuous. There had been a storm or two, 
and the rains had flushed the river bed, and the added 
flood had washed the stones away. She would never 
dare to confess it to Rivers and Phosbe, but she was 
at immense pains to gather up a heavy stone and try 
to drop it into a place between two remaining ones, 
and thus make the bridge passable. She would add 
her mite to Rivers' bridge too. Phoebe Elles should 
not be the only woman who had helped him. 

She came away from there a prey to terrible depres- 
sion, and resolved to visit no more "mouldering 
lodges" of a past in which she had no share. 

A fate seemed to be hanging over the whole world ; 
to the sad Egidia, all the inanimate things that he 
had seen and touched seemed instinct with the fore- 
boding of the particular disaster that threatened one 
man. And Jane Anne, too, who waited on her 
entirely now, at this dull season, when the personnel 
in the inn was necessarily diminished was Jane 
Anne sad, or was it only the accustomed heaviness of 
the lonely, empty-lived, country girl? 

Egidia had written her name, Miss Alice Giles, 



262 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

very clearly in the hotel book, and, in brackets, her 
nom de guerre, which had a world -wide reputation. 
She committed this solecism with a distinct purpose. 
Had her name as a novelist reached Jane Anne's ears? 
That was the point she meant to work from. 

Jane Anne certainly was full of the little civilities 
and attentions which that name generally evoked 
among the celebrity hunters of superior rank among 
whom Egidia's ways were cast. Of taciturn habit 
though the landlady's niece unmistakably was, she 
yet beamed on the authoress on every possible occa- 
sion, and lost no opportunity of insinuating herself 
into her good graces as far as was consistent with 
perfect deference and civility. 

At the close of the second day she spoke and asked 
a question. 

"If you please, ma'am," she said, "might I ven- 
ture to inquire if you are going to make a book about 
this place? So many do." 

"But tell me why you think I am likely to?" asked 
Egidia, with the elaborate indulgence of the con- 
spirator. 

"Because, ma'am, I happen to know that you are a 
writer. A gentleman that comes here sometimes, ho 
gave me one of your books once, and oh, I do like it 
so ! I got him to write my name in it, and who it 
was from! So I got his too. May I bring it out and 
show you?" 

With the gracious permission of the authoress 
Jane Anne fetched the book. It was Egidia's last 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 263 

novel but one, and on the flyleaf was Edmund Rivers' 
signature. The book had the peculiar sodden appear- 
ance of a volume much and carefully read. 

"The gentleman gave me lots of books, " Jane Anne 
went on. "And I have read them all over hun- 
dreds of times. But I like none so much as this. I 
am so fond of novels! And if it was one written 
about here, why then I should like it all the better." 

"But this is such a very quiet place. I should not 
think that anything ever could happen here?" 

"Oh, ma'am, don't be too sure! Last summer 
now, something happened here, that if you was to put 
it into a book, no one would believe it ! And I am in 
it too leastways I shall be!" 

"Tell me about it, if you have time," said Egidia, 
"and then perhaps I could work it into something." 

"It is something very serious," said Jane Anne, 
her heavy brows coming together. "It is a divorce 
case. I don't know as I ought to tell it." 

"A divorce case is known eventually to all the 
world!" said Egidia sententiously. "Besides, you 
need not tell me the names!" 

"Oh, no, I needn't then," said the girl, relieved, 
"but they are sure to slip out in the course of conver- 
sation. But then that won't be my fault, will it?" 

"No," said the other, concealing her amusement at 
Jane Anne's morality. "It will be mine I hope. 
Come and sit down here, if you are not too busy, and 
tell me about it!" 

Jane Anne was a little thrown off her majestic 



264 THE HUMAN INTEEEST 

balance by the distinguished authoress's condescension. 
She sat down, awkward, handsome, interesting even, 
as a study, but 

"This creature presumes to love Edmund too!" 
Egidia thought, and hated the mission she had set 
herself to accomplish, which involved converse, and 
an assumption of intimacy with her. 

"You see, ma'am, it is like this," began Jane 
Anne, too humble and modestly conscious of the 
capacity in which this interview had been granted 
her, not to begin on it at once. "There is a gentle- 
man, the gentleman who gave me that book, he 
comes here every year and paints he always has done 
he is not married, leastways we think not ! he is 
what they call the co-respondent." 

She said correspondent, but it was not her mispro- 
nunciation that made Egidia wince. 

"Well, then," Jane Anne went on, "last summer 
there comes a lady leastwise a very funny lady, to 
be a lady to call herself one, I mean she was a 
foreigner, with painted cheeks, and something she 
did to her hair, and she nivver let our Mr. Rivers 
alone! He didn't run after her, he really didn't, 
but she had made up her mind to have him, and she 
did. She was married!" 

"This is very interesting, and extraordinary!" 
ejaculated Egidia. 

"But she nivver telled him so, nor none of us. 
She called herself Miss Frick, and first of all she wore 
a pair of blue spectacles, but trust her, she couldn't 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 265 

stick to that long, because, you see, he couldn't 
rightly see her face while she wore them, and so one 
fine day, she went and left them off! That's why 
Mrs. Popham will have it that she was a spy! A 
spy! What for? She didn't want to spy anything. 
She just wanted Mr. Rivers, and she got him! 
They used to go jaunting into the Park at all sorts of 
hours of the night, and loverish things like that!" 

"Oh, then it is your opinion they were lovers?" 

"Yes, ma'am, I do, and I am going for to say so. 
It is me that knows best, the lawyer says so." 

"Whose lawyer?" 

"Mr. Mortimer Elles's lawyer! He's been down to 
see me times out of number. Aunt was dreadfully 
fashed; she said it put me out with my work!" 

"And this man the lover is he a nice man?" 

"Oh ma'am!" 

"Very nice?" 

"The nicest gentleman I ever saw, or ever shall 
see. I would have done anything for him!" 

"And she is she nice?" 

"Oh ma'am!" 

"You don't like her so well, I see!" 

"Ma'am, I should like to take and run this darn- 
ing-needle into her. Brazened painted-up creature, 
so rude spoken, too and great staring eyes, with 
black saucers round them " 

"Whatever she is, he will have to marry her now!" 
Egidia remarked carelessly. 

"Ma'am!" 



266 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

"Oh, yes, as a man of honour, he is bound to, if 
she is to be divorced on his account. Did not the 
lawyer tell you that? How very clever ! Perhaps he 
did not realise how a man of honour would feel under 
the circumstances. The lover is a man of honour, is 
he not?" 

"He's a real gentleman, ma'am," replied Jane 
Anne, translating Egidia's description into her own 
language. 

"Well, then, I am sorry for him!" 

"But, ma'am, I don't see why? She is a married 
woman; she carries on with him, her husband doesn't 
like it he can't separate them, so he calls in the law 
to help him." 

"Very nicely reasoned, Jane Anne! But the law 
only helps the husband to get rid of the woman who 
has betrayed him, he has nothing to do with the 
other man, who is of course bound to the woman who 
has lost her position through him. If the man you 
speak of is a gentleman, he will do what is usual, you 
may be sure of that!" 

The girl was quite speechless with emotion for a 
moment, then said, solemnly and sadly: 

"Shall I be the one to force him to that, ma'am?" 

"What do you mean? What have you to do with 
it?" 

"Because the lawyer young gentleman says it is on 
my evidence they chiefly rely, to prove the case 
against him!" 

"Oh, then, you may consider that you have 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 267 

married her to him, when the divorce is over ! But 
what is your evidence?" 

"I saw them," stammered Jane Anne, "the lawyer 
says I must tell what I know, and not swear falsely." 

"Certainly you must tell what you know to be 
true." 

She looked insistently at the girl, but not too 
insistently, lest she roused her suspicions. 

"But I should make as light of it as I could, if I 
were you, and wished the man well, as you say you 
do!" 

"Then if nothing is proved against him, he won't 
have to marry her?" inquired the girl eagerly. 

"Obviously not. Her husband will have to take 
her back!" 

"Oh," said Jane Anne, "and Mr. Eivers be just 
where he was before?" 

"Oh, is it Mr. Rivers? I know him slightly." 

"Do you? Do you? Ma'am, then if you know 
him, will you tell him that Jane Anne Cawthorne 
is his friend, and wishes him well. Why, I would 
like to die for him, I would indeed!" 

"Then you had better lie for him a little!" 

She looked keenly at the girl as she spoke, and 
with ever so slight an accent on the word whose first 
letter she had altered, and she had the satisfaction of 
seeing Jane Anne redden. 

"Understate rather than overstate, you know!" 

She now ventured to say this, seeing by the girl's 
confusion that the latter course was the one she had 



268 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

intended to take, or had perhaps even been suborned 
by a lawyer over-zealous in Mortimer Elles's behalf to 
do. 

"Nothing extenuate but naught set down in 
malice!" she went on. "Don't deny anything, or 
hold back anything, but make as light of what you 
did see as possible!" 

"I think I hear my aunt calling me!" Jane Anne 
exclaimed suddenly. "I will just run and see what 
she wants, and be back in a moment." 

Miss Giles admired Jane Anne's method of gaining 
time. Did she really go to attend on her aunt, or 
did she simply stand outside the door for a while? 
In five minutes she came back, looking somehow 
quite a different woman, and said simply : 

"I want you to tell me how I can help him, 
ma'am?" 

"Say simply what you know, and no more!" 

"Then," said Jane Anne, her eyes downcast, "I 
had better write to Mr. Perkins!" 

"Who is he?" 

"The lawyer gentleman who came here and saw me. 
He took down what I said on a piece of paper." 

"Perhaps in what you said then you exaggerated 
a little did not you?" 

"Yes, ma'am, I did," replied the girl, hiding her 
eyes in the apron she wore, and bursting into tears. 
"I was so angry with her and with him, because he 
would not even speak to me that last day, but shook 
my hand off his sleeve, that I said the worst I could. 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 269 

And truly I never saw no worse than him and her 
walking up the Broad Walk yonder hand in hand. 
It was the old lady saw him kissing her through the 
window, and standing by his bedroom door in the 
middle of the night. I didn't see that, but I was 
there in the garden before, it was I who took her to 
the window of his room, but I didn't look, I couldn't 
bear to. But I invented worse, and all I said, I told 
the lawyer I would swear to in Court." 

"How very awful!" said Egidia. "But if you 
write and say that you are not prepared to swear this 
then the chances are that the case will fall to the 
ground, and you will not have to appear in Court at 
all." 

"But then I shan't even see him!" exclaimed Jane 
Anne. 

"See him no, not then, but if there isn't any 
trial, you will have him back here painting as usual 
next spring, I should think." 

Jane Anne seized Egidia's hand and kissed it. 

"Oh, ma'am, ma'am, you know I never wanted 
nothing but that. I knew well enough he could 
never be anything to such as me, but I didn't want 
him to marry anyone else." 



"I did not expect him to marry me, but oh, I could 
not bear him to marry any one else!" 

That phrase of the country girl's was in Egidia's 
ears all day as the train bore her southwards, her mis- 



270 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

sion accomplished, and Phoebe Elles and Rivers for 
ever divided, by her means. 

She had done it, and for what motive? Now that 
it was done, the spirit of self -analysis tormented the 
woman of letters skilled in the art of heart-searching. 
The happiness of Rivers was her object, and that she 
had been convinced lay in his continued celibacy. 
She herself had nothing to gain by it, wished to gain 
nothing by it. "I do not, I do not, if I have to go 
into a convent to prove it!" she said out aloud, in the 
solitude of the railway carriage. "I am glad we are 
cousins!" she added, mentally. "All women are 
dogs in the manger, when the man they love is con- 
cerned!" was her reflection with reference to Jane 
Anne's pathetic speech. The devotion of the servant 
for the artist revolted while it touched her. "I 
wonder how many more there are of us?" she won- 
dered bitterly. "And his method indifference, and 
innate incapacity to make any woman really happy. 
Those are the men who are beloved. . . . 
Phoebe Elles is saved but she won't think so. So is 
Edmund but he won't adjiit it, perhaps. At any 
rate, I do not profit. If I did, I would kill myself 1" 



CHAPTER XVI 

She drove up to Queen Anne's Mansions in the 
dusk, and was whirled up in the lift and deposited in 
front of her own door. She inserted her little latch- 
key gilded, but practical into the key -hole. The 
drawing-room, she saw, glancing through the irides- 
cent panes at the side of the door, was lighted up. 

"She is at home, then." she thought to herself. 
"Dear, sweet, tiresome little thing that she is. 
Entertaining Dr. Andr6 with strong tea, and weak 
philosophy, no doubt. But now that I have got her 
out of this mess, I intend to wash my hands of her 
and her amatory affairs. I am sure I hope I may 
never again see a situation so at first hand. I pre- 
fer to invent them myself. It is less wearing in the 
long run." 

But there was no one with Mrs. Elles, the servant 
said, Mrs. Elles had been at home all day, had eaten 
hardly any lunch, and had just sent off a telegram. 

"Some new folly, I suppose?" thought Egidia. 
"Luckily, it does not matter now." 

She opened the drawing-room door. 

"Well, Phoebe," she said in jubilant tones, 
before she had passed the porti&re, "congratulate me! 
I have saved you at least I think I have.'* 
271 



272 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

Phoebe Elles was sitting there, staged, as it were, 
most effectively on a red draped sofa. She was 
dressed in white, and her face was as white as her 
dress, except for the famous spot of colour on each 
cheek. Her eyes were not as bright as usual ; they 
seemed a little glazed, but she smiled sweetly though 
faintly when she saw Egidia, and raised her hand, in 
a deprecating way. 

"Yes, I have saved you, Phoebe, do you hear?" 
went on Egidia, full of her subject. "I have com- 
pletely killed off the Jane Anne Cawthorne you were 
so afraid of and her evidence, and I venture to pre- 
dict that your husband will now have nothing better 
to do than to withdraw his absurd petition in conse- 
quence!" 

"It matters so little now!" said his wife, closing 
her eyes. 

Egidia was hurt at this little show of gratitude for 
the three arduous days' work she had done for her. 

""Why, what is the matter with you?" she said, 
coldly. 

"Nothing! Everything!" Mrs. Elles flung her 
arms along the back of the sofa with a despairing 
gesture, and the lace sleeves of her elaborate tea- 
gown fell back from them, disclosing a pretty girlish 
arm. 

"That is a ridiculously thin gown to wear if you 
have got a chill, or a touch of influenza, as I suppose 
you have," Egidia said testily. "Let me recommend 
you to go to bed at once, and throw it off." 



"Oh, please, Egidia!" came the moan of the 
wounded pose. "Please! You can't think how it 
all sounds now ! You tell me to lie down I shall 
lie down soon enough!" 

"My dear Phoebe, you are rather maddening, are not 
you?" said the novelist, mildly. "I am sure I do not 
know what you want to be at, but if you are not ill, 
and don't want to lie down, then sit up, and give me 
some tea ! I have been travelling since exactly nine 
o'clock this morning!" 

She rang the bell, and ordered tea for herself, 
while her guest regarded her with lack-lustre eyes, 
and did not speak, though she held her lips a little 
helplessly parted. 

"Cheer up! You look very pretty!" Egidia said 
to her soothingly, taking off her hat and flinging it 
on to a chair. "Bather like Frou-Frou in the death- 
bed scene. Poor little Frou-Frou !" 

She sat down beside Mrs. Elles on the sofa and took 
her hands. 

"Don't you really want to hear what I have done?" 

"Yes, dear, I know that you have done something 
kind, and like you. I want to hear, I do indeed, but 
I can't somehow, understand properly my brain 
seems clouded. . . ." 

"Have you been taking things morphia?" asked 
Egidia, sternly, as the suspicion crossed her mind. 

"Morphia no," Mrs. Elles answered, with a wan 
smile. "Surely morphia is no good it is only 
temporary in its effects, isn't it?" 



274 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

"Morphia, only temporary? Do please explain 
what you mean?" 

"Dear Egidia," the other woman said appealingly, 
"do you mind waiting till Edmund comes? I have 
sent for him, and then you will know all. He is 
sure to be here directly." 

"Mr. Rivers won't be such a fool as to come to 
this house, I should hope!" Egidia exclaimed angrily, 
and her use of the formal prefix alone showed how 
angry she was. "He knows what a piece of folly that 
would be, even if yon don't!" 

"He will come this time, Egidia. Don't be cross 
with me, or you will perhaps be sorry afterwards. 
Egidia, I want to thank you I want you to forgive 
me for all the trouble I have caused you the annoy- 
ance I have subjected you to. And I know you have 
done your best for me about Jane Anne Cawthorne, 
I mean but but I have settled it another and a 
shorter way, you see. . . . Edmund! " 

She rose from her sofa as Rivers came in, and it 
was then that the sceptical Egidia noticed for the 
first time how weak she seemed to be, and realised 
that it was not all acting, and that the young woman 
had really gone through some veritable emotion. 
She looked as if a mighty wind had blown her, tossed 
her, and had scattered all her energies. 

"Edmund!" she was saying, in a faint voice, her 
fingers clutching the lapel of his coat. "Edmund! 
You did come! I knew you would. And I don't mind 
now Dying is the only way to make you nice to me. " 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 275 

"You should not have come here," said Egidia to 
Edmund, quite violently, in her anger and bewilder- 
ment. Even now, she found it quite impossible to 
take Phoebe Elles seriously; she had cried "Wolf" so 
often, that the very accents and circumstance of 
tragedy in her connection inevitably suggested farce, 
or at any rate drawing-room comedy. 

"Mrs. Elles sent me an urgent telegram, bidding 
me come here at once on a matter of life and death," 
said Rivers simply, "so of course I came." 

"It is a matter of death," Mrs. Elles said, totter- 
ing back to the sofa. "Listen, both of you. I have 
done this because I was so miserable, and my life 
seemed of no use to any one rather the reverse, in 
fact. I saw so well, that if I lived, I should live only 
to disgrace you, Edmund. People have explained to 
me what it was that I should be doing to you, injur- 
ing you, preventing you from ever being President, 
forcing you to liv*e abroad, and ruining you generally. 
I saw the thought iri your eyes that last time that I 
was with you, and that you almost hated me I repre- 
sented disgrace arid shame to you ! Oh, don't deny it ! 
I am quite sure that you do not love me, or you would 
have loved through it all, and been willing to go through 
it all gladly for the sake of getting me. Men do 
some men! So I took the only way I took poison!" 

She allowed herself to fall back exhausted. 

"Tchk! Tchk!" came from Edmund or Egidia. 
The Nemesis of Pose still pursued her votary. They 
neither of them believed in her. 



276 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

"Now look here, Phcebe!" said Egidia, speaking 
to her severely, as to a spoilt child. "Look here! 
What tricks have you been playing with yourself? I 
insist on knowing." 

"And I want to tell you," Mrs. Elles replied 
plaintively, "if only you would let me! I never 
thought people treated people like me like this! 
It isn't even kind." 

So speaking, she clearly signified her annoyance at 
the complete failure of this scene, as a scene, though 
she knew that she had the trump card of death up 
her sleeve, and that in less than ten minutes the 
inherent tragedy of it all would be proved to both 
these scoffers in the most effectual way. 

"Listen," she said to them again, and her voice 
was very poignant and low. "I will tell you. I 
asked a man, who had promised me that he would do 
anything in the world for me, that I might ask him 
to do, to give me the means of death in an envelope 
sealed, so that I might use it if the burden of life 
became too great for me to bear. I told him that 
the mere knowledge that I could end it at any given 
time would help me to bear it. I did not tell him 
that I meant to use what he gave me at once, I per- 
haps did not quite but this morning in the fog I 
felt it all so hopeless so sad and the future as black 
as the present, that I drank it off all at once. That 
was an hour ago and in another hour I shall be dead. " 

"Who do you say gave it you?" Rivers asked 
quickly, when she had finished. 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 277 

"Dr. Andre. Now please don't bother me any 
more." She sank back she had literally grown 
ashen. 

"Quick! Go and fetch him ! Three floors below!'* 
said Egidia to Rivers, in a frenzied whisper. 

"But he can't have been such a devil!" she ejacu- 
lated, as the door closed on Rivers. Mrs. Elles's strange 
and indubitable pallor it was that frightened her. 

In ten minutes Rivers came back again, followed 
by Dr. Andre. The latter was smiling, and his smile 
did not fade away, when confronted with the serious 
face of Egidia, and the prostrate form of his victim. 
Mrs. Elles had not spoken a word during Rivers' 
absence, she appeared to have sunk into a state of 
coma. "When Dr. Andre entered she opened her eyes 
wide, and it was on him, not on Rivers, that her gaze 
fell. 

"Dear lady!" he said, going up to her, and taking 
one of her little helpless hands. "Forgive me! I 
have betrayed you!" 

"What?" she said, and her voice had sunk to a 
whisper. "I have taken what you gave me. Tell 
them. ..." 

"All right!" he said, in his foreign accent, gently 
stroking the hand which she abandoned to him. "I 
have given you a mauvais quart d'heure, I admit, but 
I have not killed you. Could you or any one else 
seriously imagine that I should be accessory to send- 
ing a sweet woman like you out of the world?" 



278 THE HUMAN INTEREST 

"You have very nearly frightened her out of it!" 
Egidia, to whom the doctor's flowery language did 
not appeal, remarked. 

"I acted for the best," he said earnestly. "Mr. 
Rivers will explain it to you. I gave Mrs. Elles 
something to take when she asked me, knowing that 
if I were to refuse her, the obstinate lady would have 
recourse to some other person less scrupulous than I. 
But what I gave her could not possibly harm her. 
A little bromide and water. The symptoms exhibited 
here are actually the result of sheer apprehension. 
Most curious ! But she will not die, but live to be 
grateful to me." 

"Or to hate you for having made her ridiculous," 
said Egidia, bluntly. 

While the doctor had been speaking, he had begun 
to make mesmeric passes in front of Mrs. Elles, and 
it was quite certain that she did not hear the con- 
clusion of his speech, or Egidia 's answer. Her eye- 
lids closed, she began to breathe regularly, she lay 
back, but no longer in an attitude of tension. She 
would have been pleased to know how exquisitely 
pretty and helpless she looked, and how plainly Dr. 
Andre's face showed that he thought so. Even 
Egidia was touched, in spite of her annoyance at the 
little trick she had played on them all. But then it 
had failed so absurdly, so lamentably ! 

"Poor little thing!" she said thoughtfully to 
Rivers. "It is curious how comedy dogs her wher- 
ever she goes, and whatever she does. It is very hard 



THE HUMAN INTEREST 279 

to seek the sublime always and achieve the ridic- 
ulous. I must be more gentle with her. I am hard. " 

"No, you are very good!" said Rivers kindly. 

As he spoke there was a ring at the outer door, and 
a pink envelope was put into Egidia's hands. 

"For her!" she said, indicating Mrs. Elles. 

"Shall I bring her back?" said Dr. Andre". 

"It is only something from her lawyers,'* said 
Egidia. 

"Why bring her back to worries?" 

"But it is a telegram Immediate. You must 
take the responsibility of opening it." 

"I will," said Egidia. "She empowered me to 
open all her letters and telegrams once, in a moment 
of confidence." 

She opened it. An expression of intense relief 
flooded her countenance. 

"Thank God!" she cried, almost hysterically, put- 
ting the paper into Rivers' hands, "he can't divorce 
her now, can he?" 

"Hardly!" said Rivers, smiling at the clever 
woman's naivete. "He died this morning at half- 
past nine. Poor fellow, though I don't know him!" 

Had the widow heard? She opened her eyes at 
that moment and smiled sweetly at Dr. Andre, as his 
hands passed to and fro in front of her face. With 
characteristic tact, he left her in her happy trance a 
little longer, dreaming, perchance, of fresh woods and 
pastures new. 

THE END 



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